Regional Climate Models

Abstract

Global circulation models (GCMs) have been used to study impact of climate change on water resources for hydrologic models as inputs. Recently, regional circulation models (RCMs) have been used widely for climate change study, but the RCMs have been rarely used in the climate change impacts on water resources in Korea. Therefore, this study is intended to use a set of climate scenarios derived by RegCM3 RCM (27 ㎞×27 ㎞), which is operated by Korea Meteorological Administration. To begin with, the RCM precipitation data surrounding major rainfall stations are extracted to assess validation of the scenarios in terms of reproducing low frequency behavior. A comprehensive comparison between observation and precipitation scenario is performed through statistical analysis, wavelet transform analysis and EOF analysis. Overall analysis confirmed that the precipitation data driven by RegCM3 shows capabilities in simulating hydrological low frequency behavior and reproducing spatio-temporal patterns, However, it is found that spatio-temporal patterns are slightly biased and amplitudes (variances) from the RCMs precipitation tend to be lower than the observations. Therefore, a bias correction scheme to correct the systematic bias needs to be considered in case the RCMs are applied to water resources assessment under climate change.]