Addressing heterogeneities in climate change studies for water resources in Korea

Abstract

Without exception, global warming affects the water resources in Korea. Several climate change projects have been initiated for future water resources assessment but have produced very different projections with a significant range of heterogeneities. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a standard procedure and scheme that can reduce this heterogeneity. In this study, we first examine all general circulation model (GCM) scenarios available at the IPCC Data Distribution Centre. The six A1B GCM scenarios are then selected (such as INM, CCCma, MPI_MIUB, UKMO, NIES and NCAR) for a climate change assessment of water resources in Korea. A modified version of a reliability ensemble average (M-REA) has been proposed as a multi-model ensemble weighting scheme that can combine the heterogeneous scenarios. When applied to the six A1B GCM scenarios, M-REA projected that Korea on an average will experience a 9.43% increase in precipitation in the year 2037. Keywords: Climate change, ensemble, heterogeneities