Dr. Wang’s research on climate change impacts and adaptation has been reported by the magazine of Open Access Government in its April 2022 issue, pages 372-373.
More details can be found at: https://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&edid=f2355726-b86d-4a5b-879e-c528c1881551
Title: Future climate projections for Eastern Canada
Journal: Climate Dynamics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06251-y
Abstract: Recent global warming has caused significant changes to the regional climate over Eastern Canada and brought unprecedented challenges to the local communities, such as rising sea level, shrinking sea ice coverage, increasing coastal and inland floods, accelerated coastal erosion, and so on. Although local governments have declared climate emergency in recent years, there is still a lack of real climate actions due to the poor understanding of the future climatic changes over Eastern Canada and how to mitigate and adapt to those changes from a long-term perspective. Here we attempt to fill this gap by developing high-resolution regional climate scenarios for Eastern Canada throughout the twenty-first century under three greenhouse gases emission scenarios (RCP2.6—low, RCP4.5—medium, and RCP8.5—high). The results suggest that the low-emission scenario of RCP2.6 would potentially stabilize the regional climate (i.e., no significant changes in both temperature and precipitation) over Eastern Canada after the continuous warming reaches its peak in the middle of this century. However, an average warming about 1 °C would still be expected from now to the end of this century under RCP2.6, highlighting the importance of preparing for a new climate normal even though strict carbon reduction efforts could be made before 2050. In comparison, both RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios would lead to a continuous warming over Eastern Canada with increased total precipitation throughout this century. Most importantly, the warming trend under RCP8.5 is likely to accelerate after 2050, which would potentially cause significant shifts in the precipitation seasonality and bring more climate extremes, such as droughts in August, increasing spring and fall floods, more freezing rains between fall and winter, and more heavy snowfalls in winter. The results from this study can help the local policy makers understand the importance and scientific implications of taking immediate carbon reduction actions and developing long-term climate adaptation plans.
The following paper about the downscaling performance of PRECIS to the BCC-CSM2-MR model has been recently accepted for publication by Climate Dynamics.
Wang, X., J. Guo, A. Fenech, and A. Farooque. Future Climate Projections for Eastern Canada. Climate Dynamics, accepted on March 9, 2022.
More details will come soon once the paper is published.
Title: Future Climate Scenarios: Regional Climate Modelling and Data Analysis
Journal: Frontiers in Environmental Science
Title: Evaluation of the temperature downscaling performance of PRECIS to the BCC‑CSM2‑MR model over China
Journal: Climate Dynamics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-022-06177-5
Abstract: In recent years, the Providing REgional Climates for Impacts Studies (PRECIS) developed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre has been used widely for climate downscaling and has demonstrated superior performance in reproducing the historical climatology in many regions around the world. However, all previous studies based upon PRECIS were solely driven by the GCMs from the Hadley Centre (i.e., HadCM3 and HadGEM2-ES). This inevitably limits its capability of exploring the uncertainties of regional climate projections caused by different boundary conditions from many other GCMs developed by different research centers around the world. Therefore, in this study, we attempt to investigate the downscaling performance of PRECIS to other GCMs for the first time. In particular, we use the CMIP6 boundary conditions from the BCC-CSM2-MR model from Beijing Climate Center to drive the PRECIS model in order to generate 25 km high-resolution climate scenarios for China. The downscaled temperature simulations from PRECIS for the baseline period (i.e., 1979–2004) are compared to the observational data (CN05.1) to help evaluate the downscaling performance. The results show that PRECIS can provide an obvious improvement in simulating the annual mean temperature over China, particularly in the east of China, with the bias of ~ 1 °C. Future changes in mean temperature over China under the SSP245 and SSP585 emission scenarios are further investigated with PRECIS. The downscaled projections by PRECIS show a smaller increase in temperature compared to its driving BCC-CSM2-MR, except for the late of this century under the SSP585. This study is the first attempt to use PRECIS to downscale a non-Hadley-Centre GCM and the evaluation results suggest that PRECIS does present a superior downscaling performance. The results from this study will provide a scientific basis for using PRECIS to downscale other GCMs in support of the exploration of regional climate projection uncertainties associated with different boundary conditions.