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Assessing future climate changes and extreme indicators in east and south Asia using the RegCM4 regional climate model

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Abstract

This paper assesses future climate changes over East and South Asia using a regional climate model (RegCM4) with a 50 km spatial resolution. To evaluate the model performance, RegCM4 is driven with “perfect boundary forcing” from the reanalysis data during 1970–1999 to simulate the present day climate. The model performs well in reproducing not only the mean climate and seasonality but also most of the chosen indicators of climate extremes. Future climate changes are evaluated based on two experiments driven with boundary forcing from the European-Hamburg general climate model (ECHAM5), one for the present (1970–1999) and one for the SRES A1B future scenario (2070–2099). The model predicts an annual temperature increase of about 3°–5° (smaller over the ocean and larger over the land), and an increase of annual precipitation over most of China north of 30°N and a decrease or little change in the rest of China, India and Indochina. For temperature-related extreme indicators in the future, the model predicts a generally longer growing season, more hot days in summer, and less frost days in winter. For precipitation-related extremes, the number of days with more than 10 mm of rainfall is predicted to increase north of 30°N and decrease in the south, and the maximum five-day rainfall amount and daily intensity will increase across the whole model domain. In addition, the maximum number of consecutive dry days is predicted to increase over most of the model domain, south of 40°N. Most of the Yangtze River Basin in China stands out as “hotspots” of extreme precipitation changes, with the strongest increases of daily rain intensity, maximum five-day rain amount, and the number of consecutive dry days, suggesting increased risks of both floods and droughts.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (the 973 Program, Grant No. 2010CB951101), the U.S. National Science Foundation (AGS-1049017) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 50979022 and 40911130507). The authors thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

    Huanghe Gu & Zhongbo Yu

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

    Huanghe Gu, Guiling Wang & Rui Mei

  3. Department of Geoscience, Universtity of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, USA

    Zhongbo Yu

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  1. Huanghe Gu
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  2. Guiling Wang
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Correspondence to Guiling Wang.

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Gu, H., Wang, G., Yu, Z. et al. Assessing future climate changes and extreme indicators in east and south Asia using the RegCM4 regional climate model. Climatic Change 114, 301–317 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0411-y

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