The authors used a high-resolution regional climate model(RegCM3) coupled with a chemistry/aerosol module to simulate East Asian climate in 2006 and to test the climatic impacts of aerosols on regionalscale climate.The direct radiative forcing and climatic effects of aerosols(dust,sulfate,black carbon,and organic carbon) were discussed.The results indicated that aerosols generally produced negative radiative forcing at the top-of-the-atmosphere(TOA) over most areas of East Asia.The radiative forcing induced by aerosols exhibited significant seasonal and regional variations,with the strongest forcing occurring in summer.The aerosol feedbacks on surface air temperature and precipitation were clear.Surface cooling dominated features over the East Asian continental areas,which varied in the approximate range of-0.5 to-2°C with the maximum up to-3-C in summer over the deserts of West China.The aerosols induced complicated variations of precipitation.Except in summer,the rainfall generally varied in the range of-1 to 1 mm d-1 over most areas of China.
The regional climate model RegCM3 has been one-way nested into IAP9L-AGCM, the nine-level atmospheric general circulation model of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, to perform a 20-yr （1982-2001） hindcast experiment on extraseaonal short-term prediction of China summer climate. The nested prediction system is referred to as RegCM3_IAP9L-AGCM in this paper. The results show that hindeasted climate fields such as 500-hPa geopotential height, 200- and 850-hPa zonal winds from RegCM3_IAP9L-AGCM have positive anomaly correlation coefficients （ACCs） with the observations, and are better than those from the stand-alone IAP9L-AGCM. Except for the 850-hPa wind field, the positive ACCs of the other two fields with observations both pass the 90% confidence level and display a zonal distribution. The results indicate that the positive correlation of summer precipitation anomaly percentage between the nested prediction system and observations covers most parts of China except for downstream of the Yangtze River and north of Northeast and Northwest China. The nested prediction system and the IAP9L-AGCM exhibit different hindcast skills over different regions of China, and the former demonstrates a higher skill over South China than the latter in predicting the summer precipitation.
