Performance Evaluation and Future Projection of East Asian Climate using SSP Scenario-based CORDEX-East Asia Phase 2 Multi-RCM Simulations

Recently, the CORDEX-East Asia team completed climate change simulations based on five regional climate models (RCM) under four Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios. In this study, the performance of five RCMs and their ensemble averages for present-day climate simulations are evaluated. All RCMs have relatively high performance for climatology patterns for Korea, East China and Japan, while relatively low performance is observed for the Tibetan plateau. Many RCMs share cold and wet biases. Future climate changes under four SSP scenarios are analyzed for the end of 21st century (2081 ~ 2100) compared to present day (1995 ~ 2014). East Asia is expected to experience temperature increases of 2.4??? to 6.2??? and precipitation increases of 6.7% to 12.6%, with stronger changes in higher-emission scenarios. Among the five RCMs, HadGEM3-RA projects the largest increase in temperature while GRIMs is characterized by the strongest increase in precipitation. In line with mean warming rates, warm extreme days (TX90p) are projected to increase by 35.7 ~ 93.3 days and cold extreme days (TN10p) are projected to decrease by 23.4 ~ 35.2 days. The results of this study can be used as a reference for future detailed analyses of East Asian climate change and its impacts as well as for emphasizing the importance of carbon neutrality