Simulation of Extreme Climate Events over China with Different Regional Climate Models

During phase. of the Regional Climate Model Inter-comparison Project (RMIP) for Asia, the Asian climate was estimated from July 1988 to December 1998 using six climate models. In this paper, the abilities of six climate models to simulate several important extreme climate events in China during the last years of the last century were analyzed. The modeled results for the intensity of the precipitation anomaly over the Yangtze-Huaihe Valley during the summers of 1991 and 1998 were weaker than the observed values. The positive precipitation anomaly responsible for a catastrophic flood in 1991 was well reproduced in almost all simulation results, but the intensity and range of the precipitation anomaly in 1998 were weaker in the modeled results. The spatial distribution of extreme climate events in 1997, when severe drought affected North China and flood impacted South China, was reproduced by most of the regional models because the anomaly of the large-scale background field was well-simulated, despite poor simulation of high temperature areas in the north during the summer by all models.