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Assessment of future climate change over East Asia due to the RCP scenarios downscaled by GRIMs-RMP

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Abstract

This study assesses future climate change over East Asia using the Global/Regional Integrated Model system—Regional Model Program (RMP). The RMP is forced by two types of future climate scenarios produced by the Hadley Center Global Environmental Model version 2 (HG2); the representative concentration pathways (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios for the intergovernmental panel on climate change fifth assessment report (AR5). Analyses for the current (1980–2005) climate are performed to evaluate the RMP’s ability to reproduce precipitation and temperature. Two different future (2006–2050) simulations are compared with the current climatology to investigate the climatic change over East Asia centered in Korea. The RMP satisfactorily reproduces the observed seasonal mean and variation of precipitation and temperature. The spatial distribution of the simulated large-scale features and precipitation by the RMP is generally less reflective of current climatic conditions than that is given by the HG2, but their inter-annual variations in East Asia are better captured by the RMP. Furthermore, the RMP shows higher reproducibility of climate extremes including excessive heat wave and precipitation events over South Korea. In the future, strong warming is distinctly coupled with intensified monsoonal precipitation over East Asia. In particular, extreme weather conditions are increased and intensified over South Korea as follows: (1) The frequency of heat wave events with temperature greater than 30 °C is projected to increase by 131 and 111 % in the RCP 8.5 and 4.5 downscaling, relative to the current climate. (2) The RCP 8.5 downscaling shows the frequency and variability of heavy rainfall to increase by 24 and 31.5 %, respectively, while the statistics given by the RCP 4.5 downscaling are similar to those of the current climate.

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Acknowledgments

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this manuscript. This work was funded by the Korea Meteorological Administration 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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, College of Science, Yonsei University, Room 544, Seoul, 120-749, Korea

    Ji-Woo Lee & Song-You Hong

  2. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan

    Eun-Chul Chang

  3. Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Kongju National University, Gongju, Chungnam, Korea

    Myoung-Seok Suh

  4. National Institute of Meteorological Research, Korea Meteorological Administration, Seoul, Korea

    Hyun-Suk Kang

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

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Lee, JW., Hong, SY., Chang, EC. et al. Assessment of future climate change over East Asia due to the RCP scenarios downscaled by GRIMs-RMP. Clim Dyn 42, 733–747 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-013-1841-6

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