Climate in the Late Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries over the Northern Eurasia: RCM and CMIP3 Simulations

The changes in the extreme indices for the mid twenty-first century relative to the late twentieth century have been inferred from CMIP3 daily temperature and precipitation output. It has been found that future projections for the extremes in Northern Eurasia are prone to large uncertainties arising primarily from intermodel differences. The uncertainties for “warm” extremes are larger than those for “cold” extremes not only due to greater model-to-model differences but also due to slower warming of the former. In warm season the models project drier climate conditions over some regions of the northern Eurasia, longer droughts, lesser number of wet days and increased heavy precipitation intensity. The CMIP3 simulated changes in the extremes lack credibility due to low spatio-temporal resolution of current global models. There is a pressing need to further investigate the impact related aspects of regional climate changes over the northern Eurasia using sufficiently large ensembles of regional climate model simulations.