Investigating future precipitation changes over China through a high‐resolution regional climate model ensemble
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AbstractDue to climate change, rising temperature around the world will have a great potential to influence the global hydrologic cycle, thus leading to substantial changes in the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation. In this study, the effects of global warming on the regional hydrologic cycle, particularly on the spatiotemporal patterns of precipitation, over China are investigated through a high‐resolution regional climate ensemble. In detail, the PRECIS regional climate modeling system is employed to simulate the regional climate over China from 1950 to 2099 with a fine resolution of 25 km, driven by the boundary conditions from a four‐member HadCM3‐based perturbed‐physics ensemble (i.e., HadCM3Q0, Q1, Q7, and Q13) and the ECHAM5 model. Historical simulations of the PRECIS ensemble are first compared to the observations to validate its performance in capturing both the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation. The comparisons show that the PRECIS ensemble is likely to overestimate precipitation in the south and exhibits slight dry biases in the northwest and southeast coasts of China. The projections from the PRECIS ensemble for future periods (i.e., 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s) are then analyzed to help understand how the regional characteristics of precipitation will be affected in the context of global warming. It is shown that the annual mean precipitation over China is likely to increase throughout the 21st century (i.e., by 0.078 mm/d in 2020s, 0.218 mm/d in 2050s, and 0.360 mm/d in 2080s). This may suggest that the rising temperature due to climate change will intensify the regional hydrologic cycles in China. However, apparent spatial and temporal variations are also reported in the projected precipitations from the PRECIS ensemble. For example, bigger changes in precipitation are usually observed in summer; projected precipitation changes in the southeast are apparently higher than other regions. In addition, the results show that the fluctuation range of the ensemble simulations will increase with time periods from 2020s to 2080s, indicating that the longer the projecting periods, the more uncertain the projections will be.
