To avoid dangerous climate change impact, the Paris Agreement sets out two ambitious goals: to limit the global warming to be well below 2 ℃ and to pursue effort for the global warming to be below 1.5 ℃ above the pre-industrial level. As climate change risks may be region-dependent, changes in magnitude and probability of extreme precipitation over China are investigated under those two global warming levels based on simulations from the Coupled Model Inter-Comparison Projects Phase 5. The focus is on the added changes due to the additional half a degree warming from 1.5 ℃ to 2 ℃ . Results show that regional average changes in the magnitude do not depend on the return periods with a relative increase around 7% and 11% at the 1.5 ℃ and 2 ℃ global warming levels, respectively. The additional half a degree global warming adds an additional increase in the magnitude by nearly 4%. The regional average changes in term of occurrence probabilities show dependence on the return periods, with rarer events(longer return periods) having larger increase of risk. For the 100-year historical event, the probability is projected to increase by a factor of 1.6 and 2.4 at the 1.5 ℃ and 2 ℃ global warming levels, respectively.The projected changes in extreme precipitation are independent of the RCP scenarios.
Climate effect caused by urbanization has been an indispensable anthropogenic factor in the research on regional climate change.Based on daily precipitation data,possible effects of precipitation on the development of three city groups in eastern China are discussed.With three classification methods(TP,PD and MODIS land cover),urban and rural stations are identified.The main findings are as follows.Climate effects caused by urbanization are different from place to place.In 1960 to 2009,the urbanization brought more precipitation to the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta city groups but had no obvious effect on the precipitation of the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan city group.The difference of precipitation is slight between urban and suburban areas during slow period of the urbanization from 1960 to 1979.It is more evident in the rapid period(1980 to 2009) that urbanization has positive effects on precipitation in every city group.The difference of precipitation between urban and rural stations is sensitive to the ways of distinguishing rural from urban area,which may cause uncertainties in 1960 to 1979,while it is very different in 1980 to 2009 in which urbanization favors more precipitation in all city groups and their differences in precipitation are not sensitive to the division methods.
Regional extreme cold events have changed notably with recent global warming.Understanding how these cold extremes change in China is an urgent issue.This study examines the responses of the dominant mode of China coldwave intensity(CWI)to global warming by comparing observations with simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC)Fourth Assessment Report(AR4).The leading modes of the CWI derived from empirical orthogonal function(EOF)analysis have diferent features in diferent epochs.During the cold period(1957–1979),the leading mode is characterized by centers of extreme values of CWI in northern China;while during the warm period(1980–2009),the leading mode features two maximum loading centers over northern and southern China.The southward extension of the extreme value center is associated with an increase in the intensity of coldwave variations in southern China relative to previous decades.A multi-model ensemble of seven state-of-the-art climate models shows an extension of the maximum loading of the CWI leading mode into southern China by the end of the 21st century(2080–2099)under the A1B global warming scenario(atmospheric CO2concentration of 720 ppm).These results indicate that the primary response of the leading mode of CWI to global warming might be a southward extension of the extreme value center.This response may be associated with the southward shift of the storm track observed during recent decades.A significant change in the baroclinic growth rates around40 N is accompanied by a consistent change in synoptic eddies in the troposphere,which may indicate a shift in the preferred latitude for the growth of eddies.As a result,the storm track tends to move southward,suggesting that southern China may experience increased storminess due to increased baroclinic instability in the troposphere.
By using observational daily precipitation data over the Yangtze–Huaihe River basin, ERA-40 data, and the data from eight CMIP5 climate models, statistical downscaling models are constructed based on BP-CCA(combination of empirical orthogonal function and canonical correlation analysis) to project future changes of precipitation. The results show that the absolute values of domain-averaged precipitation relative errors of most models are reduced from 8%–46% to 1%–7% after statistical downscaling. The spatial correlations are all improved from less than 0.40 to more than 0.60. As a result of the statistical downscaling multimodel ensemble(SDMME), the relative error is improved from –15.8% to –1.3%, and the spatial correlation increases significantly from 0.46 to 0.88. These results demonstrate that the simulation skill of SDMME is relatively better than that of the multimodel ensemble(MME) and the downscaling of most individual models. The projections of SDMME reveal that under the RCP(Representative Concentration Pathway)4.5 scenario, the projected domain-averaged precipitation changes for the early(2016–2035), middle(2046–2065), and late(2081–2100) 21 st century are –1.8%, 6.1%, and 9.9%, respectively. For the early period, the increasing trends of precipitation in the western region are relatively weak, while the precipitation in the east shows a decreasing trend. Furthermore, the reliability of the projected changes over the area east of115?E is higher than that in the west. The stations with significant increasing trends are primarily located over the western region in both the middle and late periods, with larger magnitude for the latter. Stations with high reliability mainly appear in the region north of 28.5?N for both periods.
