Setting Up Regional Climate Simulations for Southeast Asia

Climate change and climate variability are main drivers for land–use, especially for regions dominated by agriculture. Within the framework of the project Land–Use and Climate Change Interactions in Central Vietnam (LUCCi) regional climate simulations are performed for Southeast Asia in order to estimate future agricultural productivity and to derive adaptive land–use strategies for the future. Focal research area is the Vu Gia-Thu Bon (VGTB) river basin of Central Vietnam. To achieve the goals of this project reliable high resolution climate information for the region is required. Therefore, the regional non-hydrostatic Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to dynamically downscale large-scale coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) information. WRF will be driven by the ECHAM5-GCM data and the business-as-usual scenario A1B for the period 1960–2050. The focus of this paper is on the setup of WRF for East Asia. Prior to running the long-term climate simulation in operational mode, experimental simulations using different physical parameterizations have been conducted and analyzed. Different datasets have been used to drive the WRF model and to validate the model results. For the evaluation of the parameterization combination special emphasis is given to the representation of the spatial patterns of rainfall and temperature. In total, around 1.7Mio CPUh are required to perform the climate simulations. The required computing resources have been approved from the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (KIT, SCC).