Authors: Entao Yu Jianqi Sun Huopo Chen Weiling Xiang
Publish Date: 2014/12/25
Volume: 45, Issue: 7-8, Pages: 2013-2031
Abstract
China faces an increasing challenge in water resources in the coming decades thus highconfidence climate projection is of particular importance for the country’s future In this paper we evaluate the performance of a long highresolution continuous simulation over China based on multiple observations and the corresponding historical simulation The simulation is completed using the Weather Research and Forecasting WRF model driven by the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate version 5 MIROC5 in the context of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 The results show that both MIROC5 and WRF can capture the distribution and variability of temperature over China whereas WRF shows improvements particularly for simulation of regional features Compared with MIROC5 WRF can reproduce the spatial distribution annual cycle probability distribution and seasonal evolution of the precipitation over mainland China and the subregions with better performance The trend is of fundamental importance in the future projection estimations and WRF shows better skill in simulating the annual mean precipitation trend However there is overestimation of precipitation in Southeast China while negative one in the middle latitude of China in WRF simulation which can be traced back to model bias in atmospheric circulation and water vapor transportation in these regions Several extreme climate indices are selected to further assess the model’s performance in simulating climate extremes WRF can well reproduce the main features with better model skill compared with MIROC5 The better performance of WRF indicates the necessity of the dynamical downscaling technique and the robustness of regional climate simulation in future regional climate projection over ChinaThis work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China 2012CB955401 the Special Fund for Public Welfare Industry GYHY201306026 the National Natural Science Foundation of China 41320104007 ‘the Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center for Climate Chang’ and KLOE Open Fund XJDX0201201204 We thank Dr Manabu Abe of Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies for providing the MIROC5 data we are also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the former version of this manuscript
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