Toward More High-Resolution

ENVR1150 [18 Sep]

Climate Change Impacts & Extreme Weather Events

IM, Eun-Soon
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Division of Environment and Sustainability
Review
• The positive value of total radiative forcing leads to an uptake of energy by the climate
system. (True or False)
• The value of “4.5” in the RCP4.5 scenario indicates that the approximate level of total
radiative forcing reaches 4.5 𝑊𝑚−2 by the end of the 21st century. (True or False)
• The five stories of shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) describe different assumptions
of socio-economic developments, and SSP5 has a higher degree of realism than SSP1
because CO2 concentration is accumulated over time. (True or False)
• The RCP8.5 scenario, which is characterized by the largest increase in CO2 concentration
among RCP scenarios, does not consider the energy generation of renewable resources.
• The RCP8.5 is a highly energy-intensive scenario as a result of high population growth
and large energy consumption. (True or False)
• The uncertainty of RCP and SSP scenarios will increase towards the end of 21st century.
(True or False)
• RCP and SSP scenarios do not consider
a) Energy consumptions b) Evolution of land-use change
c) Population growth d) Chaotic behavior of climate systems
• CO2, which accounts for approximately 75% of global anthropogenic greenhouse emissions,
has the largest global warming potential compared to other greenhouse gases. (True or
False)
• While low-income countries have dominant emission sources from land use change,
anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in high-income countries mainly come from the
fossil fuel and industry sectors. (True or False)
What is Global Climate Model?

Mimic

[From Wikipedia]

• Climate model is a tool that can

translate the physical process

How ?
of climate system into tractable
numerical representation by
means of computer interface.
• Climate models are essential
tools for attributing and
predicting future changes.
Climate Model: State-of-the-art Scientific Tool

Dynamics Physics
Primitive equations for grid-resolving Parameterization of sub-grid process
scale
Improving Horizontal Resolution of Climate Model
❖ Climate model has improved in accordance with computer power

~500km ~250km

~180km ~110km
AR5
[IPCC AR4, 2007]
Necessity of High Resolution I
❖ Successful linkage between climate and impact sectors
• It is needed to bridge scaling gap between the climate models and various impact
assessment models because the impact assessments are mostly valid in regional
and local sector.
Example: Hydrological assessment at basin level
Coarse Resolution Fine resolution

Real Feature
Necessity of High Resolution II
❖ Improving the simulation of extreme events
• Only high-resolution is capable of producing extreme precipitation episodes and this
result supports the use of finer scale models to simulate extreme events.

Model -1.32
Model -0.44
Model -0.11
Observation 80

10 50 50

50 10 50 Ave=80
300 100 100
Precipitation intensity (mm/day)

[Torma et al. 2015]

Necessity of High Resolution III
❖ Elevation-Dependency of Climate Change Signal
• High elevation region tends to be more enhanced response due to global warming.
• The detailed topographic forcing in the climate model is essential for accurately
simulate snow-albedo feedback

Topography (m) over Alps High Resolution Present

Future

Snow (mm)

Elevation (m)
Low Resolution Present

Elevation (m)
Future
Snow (mm)
Dynamical & Statistical Downscaling
❖ Dynamical downscaling using regional climate model (RCM)
• Regional climate model is nested within global climate
model over specific interest region with high
resolution.
• Therefore, a very fine-scale climate dataset can be
obtained only over the limited target area from
coarse-grid global climate model information without
tremendous computational cost.

❖ Statistical downscaling using statistical transfer function

• Relationship between local observations and large scale patterns obtained from GCMs

𝑿𝒏 𝒀𝒏
Statistical methods

𝒀𝒏 =𝒇 (𝑿𝒏 )

[https://www.meteo.unican.es/downscaling/intro.html]
Concept of Weather & Climate
Future emission scenario
Weather Climate

• Weather in any location or region • Climate is defined as average

can change quickly from hour to weather.
hour, day to day, and season to • Climate prediction is to estimate the
season. statistical properties of the climate
• Weather prediction aims at system in response to external
forecasting how specific weather forcing.
patterns evolve based on the • Climate is largely determined by
knowledge of the atmosphere state global and regional geophysical
at a certain time. processes that change slowly.
• Weather prediction is close to • Climate prediction is close to
initial value problems. boundary value problems.

Ex1 The amount of annual rainfall is larger in Southern China than in Northern China.
Ex2 Hong Kong has hot and humid summer.
Ex3 It will be heavy rainfall tomorrow afternoon.
How to Project Far Future Climate Information
❖ Different concept between weather forecast and climate projection
Initial Value Problem Boundary Value Problem

Hours Days Months Years Decades Centuries

Exact timing & location Statistics in response to

changing boundary conditions,
in particular emission scenarios
of greenhouse gases
❖ Initial conditions:
• Initial state of meteorological variables (e.g. temperature, wind, pressure) to run the
climate model
❖ Boundary conditions:
• Fixed: surface conditions prescribed (e.g. topography, land-use, soil texture)
• Time-varying: composition of the atmosphere (e.g. yearly varying GHGs concentration)
• Boundary conditions are not predicted by the model and must be specified.

❖ Example for projection

• Deadly heat waves projected in the densely-populated agriculture regions of South Asia.
Initial Condition vs. Boundary Condition
❖ Schematic figure to show the temporal evolution of the temperature simulated
with the same initial conditions, but at the different locations.

January mean temperature

at the location (5°N, 10m)
Temperature

January mean temperature

at the location (50°N, 3000m)

Time
Same initial condition
Different boundary conditions
:Topography, incoming solar radiation