CMIP5 climate projections for the Yamzhog Yumco Basin: an environmental testbed for alpine lakes
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ORIGINAL PAPER
CMIP5 climate projections for the Yamzhog Yumco Basin: an environmental testbed for alpine lakes Rui Sun 1,2 & Xueqin Zhang 1 & Klaus Fraedrich 3 & Qinglong You 4 Received: 17 December 2018 / Accepted: 28 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As projections of future climate change rely on global climate model (GCM) results, the performances of five GCMs included in the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are compared with ground observations (temperature and precipitation, 1961–2005) in southern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (TP). The comparison suggests that the models capture the climatological patterns of the observed climate but with cold and wet biases. Future (twenty-first century) trends based on the GCMs’ projections produced a warming trend, and the annual precipitation of the multi-model mean is generally projected to increase. Relative to the 1986–2005 mean, both the average annual temperature and precipitation of the five GCMs are projected to increase in the short term (2016–2035), medium term (2046–2065), and long term (2081–2100) under the scenarios of rcp2.6, rcp4.5, and rcp8.5. While the temperature and precipitation changes and the difference among scenarios become substantial as time evolves. Possible regional climate change impact on the Yamzhog Yumco Basin in southern TP is demonstrated by future lake area estimates based on a minimalist parametric model and the average annual precipitation predicted by the five GCMs: the lake area of Yamzhog Yumco (including Kongmu Co) will expand under the three scenarios for the three periods relative to the 1974–1993 mean. It is expected to obtain more reliable local information with the downscaling of GCM simulations to regional scales by using regional climate models for assessing regional hydrological impacts in more detail for further studies in the southern TP.
1 Introduction Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Global Climate Models (GCMs) are employed to simulate the regional and continental climates of the past, the variability of the present climate, and projections of future climate change. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) involves model analyses of 24 GCMs which show that, for alpine regions, systematic model biases still remain (Su et al. 2013). For example, over the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (TP) models tend to
* Xueqin Zhang
1
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
2
Rubber Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences, Haikou, China
3
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
4
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences & Institute of Atmospheric Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China
underestimate observed temperatures and overestimate precipitation. Largest cold biases appear in alpine regions with highly varying topography and permanent ice, implying a common deficiency in the representation of snow-ice albedo (Mao and
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