• Atmosphere
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.55-68
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• 2007

Future climate changes over East Asia are projected by anthropogenic forcing of greenhouse gases and aerosols using ECHO-G/S (ECHAM4/HOPE-G). Climate simulation in the 21st century is conducted with three standard SRES scenarios (A1B, B1, and A2) and the model performance is assessed by the 20th Century (20C3M) experiment. From the present climate simulation (20C3M), the model reproduced reliable climate state in the most fields, however, cold bias in temperature and dry bias of summer in precipitation occurred. The intercomparison among models using Taylor diagram indicates that ECHO-G/S exhibits smaller mean bias and higher pattern correlation than other nine AOGCMs. Based on SRES scenarios, East Asia will experience warmer and wetter climate in the coming 21st century. Changes of geographical patterns from the present to the future are considerably similar through all the scenarios except for the magnitude difference. The temperature in winter and precipitation in summer show remarkable increase. In spite of the large uncertainty in simulating precipitation by regional scale, we found that the summer (winter) precipitation at eastern coast (north of $40^{\circ}N$) of East Asia has significantly increased. In the 21st century, the warming over the continents of East Asia showed much more increase than that over the ocean. Hence, more enhanced (weakened) land-sea thermal contrast over East Asia in summer (winter) will cause strong (weak) monsoon. In summer, the low pressure located in East Asia becomes deeper and the moisture from the south or southeast is transported more into the land. These result in increasing precipitation amount over East Asia, especially at the coastal region. In winter, the increase (decrease) of precipitation is accompanied by strengthening (weakening) of baroclinicity over the land (sea) of East Asia.

• Atmosphere
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.585-597
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• 2019

This study evaluates the performance of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in simulating temperature over the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment-East Asia (CORDEX-EA) Phase 2 domain for the reference period (1981~2005), and assesses the changes in temperature and its extremes in the mid-21st century (2026~2050) under global warming based on Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios. MPI-ESM-LR forced by two RCP scenarios (RCP2.6 and RCP8.5) is used as initial and lateral boundary conditions. Overall, WRF can capture the observed features of temperature distribution reflecting local topographic characteristic, despite some disagreement between the observed and simulated patterns. Basically, WRF shows a systematic cold bias in daily mean, minimum and maximum temperature over the entire domain. According to the future projections, summer and winter mean temperatures over East Asia will significantly increase in the mid-21st century. The mean temperature rise is expected to be greater in winter than in summer. In accordance with these results, summer (winter) is projected to begin earlier (later) in the future compared to the historical period. Furthermore, a rise in extreme temperatures shows a tendency to be greater in the future. The averages of daily minimum and maximum temperatures above 90 percentiles are likely to be intensified in the high-latitude, while hot days and hot nights tend to be more frequent in the low-latitude in the mid-21st century. Especially, East Asia would be suffered from strong increases in nocturnal temperature under future global warming.

• Atmosphere
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.461-472
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• 2015

The sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), which is characterized by an abrupt increase of polar stratospheric temperature by several tens of degrees in a week, has been known to affect tropospheric weather and climate on sub-seasonal time scale in the boreal winter. Such downward coupling has been often examined in North Atlantic and Europe, but rarely examined in East Asia. In this study, by applying the two definitions of SSW to the reanalysis data, the possible impacts of the SSW events on the surface air temperature (SAT) and tropospheric circulation in East Asia are analyzed. It is found that Eurasian continent, including Siberia and the Northeast Asia, tends to experience anomalously cold SAT for up to sixty days after the SSW events. The resulting SAT anomalies largely resemble those associated with negative Artic Oscillation. However, over East Asia, SSW-related SAT change is weak and not statistically significant. Only during the extreme SSW events when the downward coupling between the stratosphere and troposphere is strong, East Asia exhibits significantly cold SAT anomalies. This relationship is presented by grouping SSW events into those followed by cold SAT anomalies over East Asia and those by warm anomalies for varying threshold values of the SSW events.

• Atmosphere
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.403-417
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• 2014

Future changes in seasonal mean temperature and precipitation over East Asia under anthropogenic global warming are investigated by comparing the historical run for 1979~2005 and the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 run for 2006~2100 with 20 coupled models which participated in the phase five of Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP5). Although an increase in future temperature over the East Asian monsoon region has been commonly accepted, the prediction of future precipitation under global warming still has considerable uncertainties with a large inter-model spread. Thus, we select best five models, based on the evaluation of models' performance in present climate for boreal summer and winter seasons, to reduce uncertainties in future projection. Overall, the CMIP5 models better simulate climatological temperature and precipitation over East Asia than the phase 3 of CMIP and the five best models' multi-model ensemble (B5MME) has better performance than all 20 models' multi-model ensemble (MME). Under anthropogenic global warming, significant increases are expected in both temperature and land-ocean thermal contrast over the entire East Asia region during both seasons for near and long term future. The contrast of future precipitation in winter between land and ocean will decrease over East Asia whereas that in summer particularly over the Korean Peninsula, associated with the Changma, will increase. Taking into account model validation and uncertainty estimation, this study has made an effort on providing a more reliable range of future change for temperature and precipitation particularly over the Korean Peninsula than previous studies.

• Atmosphere
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.193-201
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• 2016

An anomalous cold-weather period occurred during January 2011 in East Asia, and this study investigates the event by focusing on the blocking phenomena formed at Northeastern Asia. The area of cold weather is determined to represent the characteristic features of abnormal cold temperature. The 2010/11 winter is divided into three periods P1, P2 (cold period), and P3. For the cold area ($30-50^{\circ}N$, $115-135^{\circ}E$) the corresponding cold period P2 is determined to be 39 days from 23 December 2010 through 30 January 2011. During P1 and P3 temperature anomalies from the climatological mean are small with large standard deviation compared to those of P2, which has large negative anomaly and small standard deviation. The period P2 is dominated by blocking, which was determined by distributions of 500-hPa geopotential height and potential temperature on the 2 PVU surface. Correlation-coefficient analyses show that during P2 the temperature in the cold area is related with pressure of Northeastern Asia, while the temperature during P1 and P3 is related with pressure of Northwest of Korea. Also, during P1 and P3 the temperature pattern shows eastward propagation, but during P2, a stationary pattern. All the observations imply that, during the cold period P2, the temperature in the cold area is related with blocking in Northeastern Asia. During P1 and P3 temperature pattern is related with 500-hPa geopotential height in Siberia, and this relationship is also observed in the climatological mean state.

• Atmosphere
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.401-412
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• 2013

East Asia experienced extremely cold weather in January 2011, while the previous December and the following February had normal winter temperature. In this study National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/NCAR) reanalysis data are used to investigate the characteristic features observed in the meteorological fields such as temperature, sea-level pressure, geopotential height, and wind during this winter period. In January the planetary-wave pattern is dominated by stationary-wave form in the mid-to-high latitude region, while transient waves are significant in the previous month. To understand the planetary-wave features quantitatively, harmonic analyses have been done for the 500-hPa geopotential height field. In the climatological-mean geopotential heights the wave numbers 1, 2, and 3 are dominant during the whole winter. In January 2011 the waves of number 1, 2, and 3 are dominant and stationary as in the climatological-mean field. In December 2010 and February 2011, however, the waves of number 4, 5, and 6 play a major role and show a transient pattern. In addition to the distinctive features in each month the planetary-wave patterns dependent on the latitude are also discussed.

• Atmosphere
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.507-524
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• 2008

In this paper, future climate changes over East Asia($20^{\circ}{\sim}50^{\circ}N$, $100^{\circ}{\sim}150^{\circ}E$) are projected by anthropogenic forcing of greenhouse gases and aerosols using coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) simulations based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) B1, A1B and A2 scenarios. Before projection future climate, model performance is assessed by the $20^{th}$ Century (20C3M) experiment with bias, root Mean Square Error (RMSE), ratio of standard deviation, Taylor diagram analysis. The result of examination of the seasonal uncertainty of T2m and PCP shows that cold bias, lowered than that of observation, of T2m and wet bias, larger than that of observation, of PCP are found over East Asia. The largest wet bias is found in winter and the largest cold bias is found in summer. The RMSE of temperature in the annual mean increases and this trend happens in winter, too. That is, higher resolution model shows generally better performances in simulation T2m and PCP. Based on IPCC SRES scenarios, East Asia will experience warmer and wetter climate in the coming $21^{st}$ century. It is predict the T2m increase in East Asia is larger than global mean temperature. As the latitude goes high, the warming over the continents of East Asia showed much more increase than that over the ocean. An enhanced land-sea contrast is proposed as a possible mechanism of the intensified Asian summer monsoon. But, the inter-model variability in PCP changes is large.

• Atmosphere
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.79-91
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• 2017

It is imperative to understand the characteristics of atmospheric circulation patterns under the climate system due to its impact on climatic factors. Thus this study focused on analyzing the impact of the atmospheric circulation on the relationship between precipitation and temperature regionally. Here we used monthly gridded observational data (i.e., CRU-TS3.2, NOAA-20CR V2c) and HadGEM2-AO climate model by RCP8.5, for the period of 1960~1999 and 2060~2099. The experiment results indicated that the negative relationship was presented over East Asia and Europe during summer. On the other hand, at around Korea (i.e. EA1: $31^{\circ}N{\sim}38^{\circ}N$, $126^{\circ}E{\sim}140^{\circ}E$) and Northwestern Europe (i.e. EU1: $48^{\circ}N{\sim}55^{\circ}N$, $0^{\circ}E{\sim}16^{\circ}E$) in winter, strong positive relationship dominate due to warm moist advection come from ocean related to intensity variation of the East Asian winter monsoon (EAWM) and North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), respectively. It was found that values of positive relation in EA1 and EU1 at the end of the 21st century is regionally greater than at the end of 20th century during winter since magnitude of variation of the EAWM and NAO is projected to be greater in the future as result of simulation with RCP 8.5. Future summer, the negative correlations are weakened in EA1 region while strengthened in EU1 region. For better understanding of correlations with respect to RCP scenarios, a further study is required.

• Atmosphere
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.249-256
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• 2020

We investigate regional differences in the characteristics of cold surges that occurred over the South Korea during winter season (December-February, 1981/1982~2017/2018). A significant regional contrast of cold surge characteristics exists and we found that this is closely related to the spatially inhomogeneous distribution of winter-mean climatological surface temperature in association with the complex topography of the Korean peninsula. For the regions of the temperature below -1℃ (Region1; R1), the frequency of cold surges is inversely proportional to the surface temperature almost linearly. In case of the regions above -1℃ (Region2; R2), cold surge frequency does not exhibit any clear dependency on the surface temperature. Duration and number of occurrences of cold surge between the two regions showed clear difference. Dynamical evolution of cold surges before the onset showed a sharp contrast between R1 and R2. In R1, cold surface air temperature (SAT) was already predominant over East-Asia before the onset and the cold temperature was sustained after the occurrence. On the contrary, warm SAT was predominant over East-Asia before the onset in R2. The SAT suddenly drops just after the cold surge occurrence. We present different origin of wave activity and propagation characteristics between the two types: Wave-activity flux (WAF) was relatively weaker and wave disturbances moved eastward in R1 along with the WAF mainly directing eastward. In case of R2, WAF was stronger and directing southeastward in the upstream of South Korea movement erasing predominant warmer air eventually causing sudden temperature drops over southern provinces over South Korea.

• Atmosphere
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.105-118
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• 2017

This study assesses the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in reproducing regional climate over CORDEX-East Asia Phase 2 domain with different cumulus parameterization schemes [Kain-Fritch (KF), Betts-Miller-Janjic (BM), and Grell-Devenyi-Ensemble (GD)]. The model is integrated for 27 months from January 1979 to March 1981 and the initial and boundary conditions are derived from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast Interim Reanalysis (ERA-Interim). The WRF model reasonably reproduces the temperature and precipitation characteristics over East Asia, but the regional scale responses are very sensitive to cumulus parameterization schemes. In terms of mean bias, WRF model with BM scheme shows the best performance in terms of summer/winter mean precipitation as well as summer mean temperature throughout the North East Asia. In contrast, the seasonal mean precipitation is generally overestimated (underestimated) by KF (GD) scheme. In addition, the seasonal variation of the temperature and precipitation is well simulated by WRF model, but with an overestimation in summer precipitation derived from KF experiment and with an underestimation in wet season precipitation from BM and GD schemes. Also, the frequency distribution of daily precipitation derived from KF and BM experiments (GD experiment) is well reproduced, except for the overestimation (underestimation) in the intensity range above (less) then $2.5mm\;d^{-1}$. In the case of the amount of daily precipitation, all experiments tend to underestimate (overestimate) the amount of daily precipitation in the low-intensity range < $4mm\;d^{-1}$ (high-intensity range > $12mm\;d^{-1}$). This type of error is largest in the KF experiment.