Selecting CMIP6-Based Future Climate Scenarios for Impact and Adaptation Studies
Hideo Shiogama, Noriko N. Ishizaki, Naota Hanasaki, Kiyoshi Takahashi, Seita Emori, Rui Ito, Toshiyuki Nakaegawa, Izuru Takayabu, Yasuaki Hijioka, Yukari N. Takayabu, Ryosuke Shibuya
Abstract
Climate change impact assessment studies often use future projections of only a few global climate models (GCMs) due to limited research resources. Here we develop a novel method to select a small subset of GCMs that widely capture the uncertainty range of large ensemble. By applying this method, we select a subset of five GCM projections from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble for impact and adaptation studies in Japan. At first, we omit GCMs whose global warming projections have been evaluated to be overestimated in the recent literature. Then, we select a subset of five GCMs that widely captures the uncertainty ranges for 8 climate variables and have good performances in present-climate simulations. These selected GCM simulations will be used to provide better climate scenarios for impact and adaptation studies than those in the previous impact assessment project.