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This study investigates the capability of the regional climate model, RegCM3, to simulate fine-scale regional climate over a narrow peninsula or archipelago. The model is run in one-way double-nested mode with one mother domain and two nested domains. The mother domain encompasses the eastern and southern regions of Asia and adjacent oceans with a grid spacing of 60 km. The first nested domain focuses on the Korean peninsula and the second one covers the Philippine archipelago with a grid spacing of 20 km. The simulation spans a period of 5 years and 1 month, from November 2000 to December 2004. The sensitivity of the two convection schemes, namely, the Grell scheme (Grell) and the MIT-Emanuel scheme (EMU), is studied.Model results obtained with both the Grell and EMU show reasonable performance in capturing the seasonal variation and the spatial characteristics of the East Asian monsoon. However, the Grell simulation appears to have persistent cold and dry biases in the summer season. There is a definite improvement in these model deficiencies by the implementation of EMU. Although the temperature fields in the Grell and EMU simulations are essentially the same in terms of the spatial distribution, the EMU simulation is quantitatively in better agreement with the observed estimates, indicating a substantial reduction in the cold bias. Further, in comparison with the Grell simulation, the EMU simulation shows an improvement in the timing and amplitude of the rain band propagating northward. The spatial distributions of precipitation also have good quality, capturing the localized maxima over Korea. The frequency distributions of daily temperature and precipitation simulated by EMU are closer to observations than those of the Grell simulation. It is found that the convective precipitation derived from different convection parameterizations is a major contributor to the performance of the model in summer.

Forecast skill of the APEC Climate Center (APCC) Multi-Model Ensemble (MME) seasonal forecast system in predicting two main types of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), namely canonical (or cold tongue) and Modoki ENSO, and their regional climate impacts is assessed for boreal winter. The APCC MME is constructed by simple composite of ensemble forecasts from five independent coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models. Based on a hindcast set targeting boreal winter prediction for the period 1982-2004, we show that the MME can predict and discern the important differences in the patterns of tropical Pacific sea surface temperature anomaly between the canonical and Modoki ENSO one and four month ahead. Importantly, the four month lead MME beats the persistent forecast. The MME reasonably predicts the distinct impacts of the canonical ENSO, including the strong winter monsoon rainfall over East Asia, the below normal rainfall and above normal temperature over Australia, the anomalously wet conditions across the south and cold conditions over the whole area of USA, and the anomalously dry conditions over South America. However, there are some limitations in capturing its regional impacts, especially, over Australasia and tropical South America at a lead time of one and four months. Nonetheless, forecast skills for rainfall and temperature over East Asia and North America during ENSO Modoki are comparable to or slightly higher than those during canonical ENSO events.

On the Korean peninsula, observation is being conducted so densely that the mean distance between stations of the extensive ground-based data network is only 12.7 km. Nevertheless, because of significant mountainous terrain and the fact that most observation sites are situated in low areas rather than mountain tops or ridges, the detailed topographical effect on temperature distribution is not reflected properly. A model using fine-scale grid spacing can represent such a topographical effect well, but due to systematic biases in the model, simulated temperature distribution will be different from the actual observation. This study therefore attempts to produce a detailed mean temperature distribution for South Korea through a method combining dynamical downscaling and statistical correction. For the dynamical downscaling, the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model developed by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is used. We applied a multi-nesting technique to obtain high-resolution climate information (3 km) with a focus on the Korean peninsula. The integration period was 10 years from January 1999 to December 2008. For the correction of systematic biases shown in downscaled temperature, a perturbation method divided into the mean and the perturbation part was used with a different correction method being applied to each part. The mean was corrected by a weighting function while the perturbation was corrected by the self-organizing maps method, which is one of the artificial neural networks method. The results with correction agree well with the observed pattern compared to those without correction, improving the spatial and temporal correlations as well as the root mean square error. In addition, they represented detailed spatial features of temperature including topographic signals, which cannot be expressed properly by gridded observation. Through comparison with in-situ observation with gridded values after objective analysis, it was found that the detailed structure correctly reflected topographically diverse signals that could not be derived from limited observation data.

In this study, the regional climate of the Korean Peninsula is dynamically downscaled using a high‐resolution regional climate model forced by two representative concentration pathway scenarios of Hadley Centre Global Environmental Model version 2‐Atmosphere and Ocean (HadGEM2‐AO) using multiple regional climate models. Changes in extreme precipitation indices are investigated. Through the evaluation of the present climate, a multi‐model ensemble reasonably reproduces the long‐term climatology of extreme precipitation indices over South Korea despite some systematic errors. Both mean and extreme precipitation intensities for 80 years in the future (2021–2100) increase compared to those of the present. However, the increasing rates of indices related to precipitation intensities are different according to sub‐period, season, and emission scenarios. Mean and extreme precipitation intensities of the future climate increase during the summer when most extreme precipitation events occur over the Korean Peninsula. Also, abnormal extreme precipitation can increase during future summers due to increasing variances of indices related to extreme precipitation intensity. Increasing extreme summer precipitation over South Korea is proportional to the increases in convective precipitation compared to non‐convective precipitation. This indicates that future changes in summer precipitation, with regard to intensity and frequency, over South Korea, among representative concentration pathway scenarios, are more related to a change in convective instability rather than synoptic condition.

The boreal summer-blocking regions were defined using the reanalysis data over the three decades of , and the influence of the blocking on atmospheric circulation in East Asia was examined. The summer blocking occurred mostly in North Europe, Ural region, Sea of Okhotsk (OK), and northeastern Pacific. The summer blocking was the major mode in these four regions according to principal component analysis using 500 hPa geopotential heights. Among the four blocking regions, OK blocking frequencies (OK BFs) showed negative and positive correlations with summer temperature and precipitation of Northeast Asia centered around the East Sea/Sea of Japan, respectively. In particular, the OK BF had a statistically significant correlation coefficient of À0.54 with summer temperatures in the Korean Peninsula. This indicates that the summer temperature and precipitation in this region were closely related to the OK blocking. According to the composite analysis for the years of higher-than-average BF (positive BF years), the OK High became stronger and expanded, while the North Pacific High was weakened over the Korean Peninsula and Japan and an anomalously deep trough was developed in the upper layer (200 hPa). As the cool OK High expanded, the temperature decreased over Northeast Asia centered around the East Sea/Sea of Japan and the lower level (850 hPa) air converged cyclonically, resulting in the increased precipitation, which induced the divergence in the upper layer and thereby strengthened the jet stream. Thus, the boreal summer OK blocking systematically influencing the area as the most dominant mode.