Quantifying the Likelihood of Regional Climate Change: A Hybridized Approach
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Schlosser-2013-Quantifying the like.pdf
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Author(s)
Gao, Xiang
Forest, Chris E.
Awadalla, Sirein
Farmer, William
Schlosser, Adam
Strzepek, Kenneth Marc
Sokolov, Andrei P.
Date Issued
May 2013
Journal
Journal of Climate
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Schlosser, C. Adam, Xiang Gao, Kenneth Strzepek, Andrei Sokolov, Chris E. Forest, Sirein Awadalla, and William Farmer. “Quantifying the Likelihood of Regional Climate Change: A Hybridized Approach.” Journal of Climate 26, no. 10 (May 2013): 3394-3414. © 2013 American Meteorological Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The growing need for risk-based assessments of impacts and adaptation to climate change calls for increased capability in climate projections: specifically, the quantification of the likelihood of regional outcomes and the representation of their uncertainty. Herein, the authors present a technique that extends the latitudinal projections of the 2D atmospheric model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Integrated Global System Model (IGSM) by applying longitudinally resolved patterns from observations, and from climate model projections archived from exercises carried out for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The method maps the IGSM zonal means across longitude using a set of transformation coefficients, and this approach is demonstrated in application to near-surface air temperature and precipitation, for which high-quality observational datasets and model simulations of climate change are available. The current climatology of the transformation coefficients is observationally based. To estimate how these coefficients may alter with climate, the authors characterize the climate models’ spatial responses, relative to their zonal mean, from transient increases in trace-gas concentrations and then normalize these responses against their corresponding transient global temperature responses. This procedure allows for the construction of metaensembles of regional climate outcomes, combining the ensembles of the MIT IGSM—which produce global and latitudinal climate projections, with uncertainty, under different global climate policy scenarios—with regionally resolved patterns from the archived IPCC climate model projections. This hybridization of the climate model longitudinal projections with the global and latitudinal patterns projected by the IGSM can, in principle, be applied to any given state or flux variable that has the sufficient observational and model-based information.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Global Change Science
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00730.1
