Abstract
Projecting climate change scenarios to local scales is important for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of climate change on society and the environment. Many of the global climate models (GCMs) that are participating in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) do not fully resolve regional-scale processes and therefore cannot capture regional-scale changes in temperatures and precipitation. We use a regional climate model (RCM) to dynamically downscale the GCM’s large-scale signal to investigate the changes in regional and local extremes of temperature and precipitation that may result from a changing climate. In this paper, we show preliminary results from downscaling the NASA/GISS ModelE IPCC AR5 Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 6.0 scenario. We use the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as the RCM to downscale decadal time slices (1995–2005 and 2025–2035) and illustrate potential changes in regional climate for the continental U.S. that are projected by ModelE and WRF under RCP6.0. The regional climate change scenario is further processed using the Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system to explore influences of regional climate change on air quality.
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The United States Environmental Protection Agency through its Office of Research and Development funded and managed the research described here. It has been subjected to the Agency’s administrative review and approved for publication.
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Questioner Name: P. Makar
Q: The model results show effects due to nesting/downscaling very well. What would be the impact of running an RCM globally? That is, the computers we use should have reached the state where this is possible. Would you expect similar effects with a global RCM?
A: It is difficult to differentiate effects due to discontinuities at the lateral boundaries from errors in the RCM physics formulations. Though a global version of WRF has been developed, to my knowledge it has not been used for long-term simulations, which could help determine whether WRF is in radiative balance. We are experimenting with using WRF on a hemispheric domain, which may reduce the influence of lateral boundary conditions. It might also be interesting to conduct a global-to-regional “Big Brother Experiment” using the WRF model.
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Nolte, C. et al. (2014). Influences of Regional Climate Change on Air Quality Across the Continental U.S. Projected from Downscaling IPCC AR5 Simulations. In: Steyn, D., Builtjes, P., Timmermans, R. (eds) Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXII. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_2
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