Assessing model performance of climate extremes in China: an intercomparison between CMIP5 and CMIP3

Huopo Chen () and Jianqi Sun

Climatic Change, 2015, vol. 129, issue 1, 197-211

Abstract: In this study, we present a brief analysis of the performances of global climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) in simulating climate extreme events in China and compare the results with those of the previous model generation (CMIP3). The primary focus of this analysis is the climate mean and variability of each extreme index. Results show that the CMIP5 models are generally able to capture the mean climate extremes and trends compared with a new gridded observational dataset. The model spread for some extreme indices is reduced in CMIP5 when compared with CMIP3. Furthermore, the models generally show higher skills in simulating the temperature-based indices than the precipitation-based indices in terms of means and linear trends. Results from six reanalyses further reveal large uncertainties for these indices and it is difficult to say which reanalysis is better for comparison with the simulations of all indices. Based on the relative errors of the climatology, the model evaluation varies considerably from one index to another. However, some models appear to perform substantially better than the others when the average of all indices is considered for each model, and the median ensembles outperform the individual models in terms of all the extreme indices and their means. Additionally, a relationship is observed between the improved simulation of the climate mean and the improved performance of its variability, although this improvement is limited to particular models. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-014-1319-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:129:y:2015:i:1:p:197-211

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-014-1319-5

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().