Science Source

Y Gao, J S Fu, J B Drake, Y Liu, J-F Lamarque

Environmental Research Letters

Published date November 6, 2012

Projected changes of extreme weather events in the eastern United States based on a high resolution climate modeling system

This study is the first evaluation of dynamical downscaling using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model on a 4 km × 4 km high resolution scale in the eastern US driven by the Community Earth System Model version 1.0 (CESM v1.0)
Examines the global and regional climate model results, and corrects an inconsistency in skin temperature during the downscaling process by modifying the land/sea mask
In comparison with observations, WRF shows statistically significant improvement over CESM in reproducing extreme weather events, with improvement for heat wave frequency estimation as high as 98%
Uses the fossil fuel intensive scenario Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 to study a possible future mid-century climate extreme in 2057–9
Finds that both the heat waves and the extreme precipitation in 2057–9 are more severe than the present climate in the Eastern US
Finds that the Northeastern US shows large increases in both heat wave intensity (3.05 °C higher) and annual extreme precipitation (107.3 mm more per year)
Finds that Cleveland has it the worst, with a heat wave temperature increase of 3.71°C by Philadelphia (3.69°C)