Projected changes of extreme weather events in the eastern United States based on a high resolution climate modeling system

By Yang Gao, Joshua S. Fu, J. Drake, Yang Liu, J. Lamarque. 2012

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study is the first evaluation of dynamical downscaling using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model on a 4 km × 4 km high resolution scale in the eastern US driven by the new Community Earth System Model version 1.0 (CESM v1.0). First we examined the global and regional climate model results, and corrected an inconsistency in skin temperature during the downscaling process by modifying the land/sea mask. In comparison with observations, WRF shows statistically significant improvement over CESM in reproducing extreme weather events, with improvement for heat wave frequency estimation as high as 98%. The fossil fuel intensive scenario Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 was used to study a possible future mid-century climate extreme in 2057–9. Both the heat waves and the extreme precipitation in 2057–9 are more severe than the present climate in the Eastern US. The Northeastern US shows large increases in both heat wave intensity (3.05 °C higher) and annual extreme precipitation (107.3 mm more per year).

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0e6242d4a6d4709e6232de15d247b1ca294e912

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. E. Bou‐Zeid
2. M. Oppenheimer
3. Y. Tramblay
4. P. Lucas‐Picher
5. Peter Berg
6. C. Caillaud
7. E. Brisson
8. Jinho Yoon

In Global and Planetary Change

1. M. Oppenheimer
2. E. Bou‐Zeid
3. Y. Tramblay
4. P. Lucas‐Picher
5. K. Ebi
6. Peter Berg
7. C. Caillaud
8. E. Brisson

Citations in the corpus

• Convection‐permitting modeling with regional climate models: Latest developments and next steps (2021, background): “Taking advantage of higher resolution topography and land use information, Gao et al. (2012) found more severe heatwaves simulated in a mid-century 4-km CPRCM simulation over eastern U.S. Analyzing a PGW simulation, Raghavendra et al. (2019) projected a tripling in frequency and sixfold increase in…”
• Interactions between urban heat islands and heat waves (2018, background): “Previous studies using global climate models have either been limited to grid cell-average HWs (Coumou and Robinson 2013, Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq 2010, Fischer et al 2013, Gao et al 2012) or focused on the urban HWs in general rather than their synergistic effects with UHIs (Oleson et al 2015a).”
• Quantitative attribution of climate effects on Hurricane Harvey’s extreme rainfall in Texas (2018, background): “Nonetheless, recent climate projection studies (Gao et al 2012, Janssen et al 2014, Wuebbles et al 2014) did not underscore the Gulf States as a hotspot for a significant increase in summertime extreme precipitation.”
• Extreme Precipitation Indices over China in CMIP5 Models. Part II: Probabilistic Projection (2016, background): “…of climate change in the future (Sillmann et al. 2013; Kharin et al. 2013; Thibeault and Seth 2014; Swain and Hayhoe 2015), because an MME can reduce the uncertainties and increase the reliability of prediction (Shongwe et al. 2009; Chang et al. 2012; Gao et al. 2012; Villarini and Vecchi 2012).”