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- Title
Precipitation Characteristics and Future Changes Over the Southern Slope of Tibetan Plateau Simulated by a High‐Resolution Global Nonhydrostatic Model.
- Authors
Na, Ying; Lu, Riyu; Fu, Qiang; Kodama, Chihiro
- Abstract
Current climate model resolution cannot accurately describe the complex topography over the Tibetan Plateau, which limits our understanding of past and future precipitation over this region. This study investigates the daily precipitation characteristics and its future changes over the Tibetan Plateau, especially for the southern slope of Tibetan Plateau (SSTP), by 14‐km Nonhydrostatic ICosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM) with explicitly calculated convection for historical and future 30‐years period. By comparing with the satellite Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), NICAM well reproduces the historical precipitation spatial pattern, seasonal cycle, and the extreme precipitation belt over SSTP, but overestimates precipitation amount by ∼35%. It is found that heavy precipitation probability decreases as elevation becomes higher while the light precipitation generally shows the opposite. For the precipitation changes during June to September from 1979–2008 to 2075–2104, NICAM predicts that mean precipitation will decrease over low‐level SSTP but increase over high‐level SSTP. Nonprecipitation and heavy precipitation probability will increase while light precipitation probability will decrease in the future over SSTP. The extreme precipitation probability and intensity will increase ∼50%/°C and ∼8%/°C over SSTP, and this increase is more obvious as elevation becomes higher. The robust increase of extreme precipitation along the SSTP topography is unique and has not been identified by the climate model simulations before. The strong meridional gradient of specific humidity over SSTP is found to be further enhanced under global warming, and this gradient enhancement is suggested to be responsible for the increase in the extreme precipitation over SSTP. Key Points: NICAM well reproduces precipitation spatial pattern, seasonal cycle, and extreme precipitation belt over SSTP as compared with observationsFuture mean precipitation over SSTP during the summer will decrease over lower SSTP but increase over higher SSTP from NICAM simulationThe projected extreme precipitation will increase along the SSTP topography, especially over higher SSTP, at the end of the 21st century
- Subjects
TIBETAN Plateau; ATMOSPHERIC models; TOPOGRAPHY; GLOBAL Precipitation Climatology Project; HIGH resolution spectroscopy
- Publication
Journal of Geophysical Research. Atmospheres, 2021, Vol 126, Issue 3, p1
- ISSN
2169-897X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2020JD033630