Selecting climate change scenarios for regional hydrologic impact studies based on climate extremes indices

  • Seung Beom Seo
  • Young-Oh Kim
  • Youngil Kim
  • Hyung-Il Eum
Article
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Abstract

When selecting a subset of climate change scenarios (GCM models), the priority is to ensure that the subset reflects the comprehensive range of possible model results for all variables concerned. Though many studies have attempted to improve the scenario selection, there is a lack of studies that discuss methods to ensure that the results from a subset of climate models contain the same range of uncertainty in hydrologic variables as when all models are considered. We applied the Katsavounidis–Kuo–Zhang (KKZ) algorithm to select a subset of climate change scenarios and demonstrated its ability to reduce the number of GCM models in an ensemble, while the ranges of multiple climate extremes indices were preserved. First, we analyzed the role of 27 ETCCDI climate extremes indices for scenario selection and selected the representative climate extreme indices. Before the selection of a subset, we excluded a few deficient GCM models that could not represent the observed climate regime. Subsequently, we discovered that a subset of GCM models selected by the KKZ algorithm with the representative climate extreme indices could not capture the full potential range of changes in hydrologic extremes (e.g., 3-day peak flow and 7-day low flow) in some regional case studies. However, the application of the KKZ algorithm with a different set of climate indices, which are correlated to the hydrologic extremes, enabled the overcoming of this limitation. Key climate indices, dependent on the hydrologic extremes to be projected, must therefore be determined prior to the selection of a subset of GCM models.

Keywords

Climate change scenarios Scenario selection Global circulation model Climate extremes indices Katsavounidis–Kuo–Zhang algorithm 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Grant (NRF-2017R1A6A3A11031800) through the Young Researchers program funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea. This research was also supported by a Grant (2014001310007) from the Climate Change Correspondence Program funded by the Ministry of Environment in Korea.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institute of Engineering ResearchSeoul National UniversitySeoulSouth Korea
  2. 2.Department of Civil and Environmental EngineeringSeoul National UniversitySeoulSouth Korea
  3. 3.Alberta Environment and Parks (AEP), Environmental Monitoring and Science DivisionCalgaryCanada

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