Revealing historical observations and future projections of precipitation over Northwest China based on dynamic downscaled CMIP6 simulations

Abstract

The warming climate driven by global change has great potential in altering regional and global hydrologic cycles, thus leading to considerable changes in spatial variability and temporal pattern of precipitation. Northwest China (NW) has witnessed a significant wetting trend over the past decades, while the persistence of this wetting trend and potential changes in precipitation under future climate impacts remains elusive. In this study, long-term meteorological observations were used to probe historical variations of precipitation from 1951 to 2020, and the WRF model was employed as a regional climate model to examine future precipitation patterns over NW. Two 9-year downscaled WRF simulations were conducted comprising of historical (WRF-HIST; 2012–2020) and future climate change scenarios (WRF-SSP585; 2047–2055) using bias-corrected global climate model outputs from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6). Compared with ground observations, the WRF model exhibited strong capability in capturing the spatial pattern and temporal variations of precipitation across the NW. Intense precipitation was mainly found in stations located at northern NW and southeastern NW. Summertime precipitation substantially contributed to annual precipitation over the study region. Future precipitation projections suggest significant decreases of precipitation across the southern and eastern NW, with a stronger reduction magnitude in summer. Further, extreme precipitation events were projected to decrease in spring and summer, suggesting that the NW may become drier and the wetting trend may shift to another pattern in the 2050s under the SSP585 climate scenario. Overall, this study reveals historical and future potential changes in precipitation over NW through a high-resolution, dynamically downscaled dataset from WRF modeling, which in turn will help inform regional mitigation and adaption on potential impacts of future climate change on NW.

Will the arid and semi-arid regions of Northwest China become wetter Under Stabilized 1.5°C and 2.0°C Warming Futures?

“…The simulation period included the historical reference period (1985-2014) and future warming scenarios (2071-2100). The WRF model was widely used to simulate climate change, and many studies proved that there was a better simulation effect over China using WRF model (Tang et al, 2019;Yang et al, 2023). A single one-way domain with lambert projection was used, with the center of 35.8°N, 116.8°E, and had a horizontal resolution of 30 km and a grid of 262 (longitude) × 186 (latitude), which covered East Asia.…”

“…It has been noted that the water availability in NW has shown an increasing trend over the last 60 years and has a distinct regional distribution (Wang et al, 2020). There are few studies addressing changes in water availability under future warming scenarios, and the conclusions regarding changes in precipitation in NW are still controversial (Yu et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2023). Therefore, this part will discuss the spatio-temporal variations of water availability in NW under future warming scenarios.…”

“…For example, based on the projection of multi-model ensembles, Yu et al (2018) reported that the increase in precipitation would be stronger in winter than in summer, while Mannig et al (2018) projected a drying trend in warm season. And the results of the dynamical downscaling simulations reported an overall reduction in precipitation in the Northwest in 2050 (Yang et al, 2023). Additionally, the mechanism of precipitation variation in NW is complex.…”