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Potential for added value to downscaled climate extremes over Korea by increased resolution of a regional climate model

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Abstract

This study estimates the potential for added value in dynamical downscaling by increasing the spatial resolution of the regional climate model (RCM) over Korea. The Global/Regional Integrated Model System—Regional Model Program with two different resolutions is employed as the RCM. Large-scale forcing is given by a historical simulation of a global climate model, namely the Hadley Center Global Environmental Model version 2. As a standard procedure, the reproducibility of the RCM results for the present climate is evaluated against the reanalysis and observation datasets. It is confirmed that the RCM adequately reproduces the major characteristics of the observed atmospheric conditions and the increased resolution of the RCM contributes to the improvement of simulated surface variables including precipitation and temperature. For the added-value assessment, the interannual and daily variabilities of precipitation, temperature are compared between the different resolution RCM experiments. It is distinctly shown that variabilities are additionally described as the spatial resolution becomes higher. The increased resolution also contributes to capture the extreme weather conditions, such as heavy rainfall events and sweltering days. The enhanced added value is more evident for the precipitation than for the temperature, which stands for a usefulness of the high-resolution RCM especially for diagnosing potential hazard related to heavy rainfall. The results of this study assure the effectiveness of increasing spatial resolution of the RCM for detecting climate extremes and also provide credibility to the current climate simulation for future projection studies.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Suryun Ham for valuable discussions that improved this manuscript. This work was funded by the KMA Research and Development Program under Grant CATER 2012-3084. The use of a computing system from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is also greatly appreciated.

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  1. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Yonsei University, Seoul, 120749, South Korea

    Ji-Woo Lee & Song-You Hong

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  1. Ji-Woo Lee
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Correspondence to Song-You Hong.

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Lee, JW., Hong, SY. Potential for added value to downscaled climate extremes over Korea by increased resolution of a regional climate model. Theor Appl Climatol 117, 667–677 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-013-1034-6

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