Downscaling of Climate

Projections in Japan
Izuru TAKAYABU
(Meteorological Research Institute)
Japan’s 1st National Workshop on Economics of Climate Change
and Low Carbon Growth Strategies in Northeast Asia
20 April 2010 (Tokyo, Japan)
What is Downscaling?
What is downscaling?

Bridging between the climate model results

and the impact studies
 Local climate around Japan
(Winter season)

Snow depth on Feb.

(Iizuka, 2008)

(@NIED)
 Influence of horizontal resolution on
the representation of precipitation

RCM
AOGCM
(20km)
(T42, 280km)

RCM OBS.
(60km) (R/A 5km)

We need at least 20km resolution model to represent

the local climate contrast of Japan Islands. (Takayabu et al. 2006)
We have two main funding related
with the downscaling around Japan
(1) “Projection of changes in extremes in the
future”, which belongs to the KAKUSHIN
program sponsored by MEXT. Reduce
uncertainty by using very high resolution model.

(2) “Multi-method Included Downscaling for

Assessment Study”, which belongs to the S-5
project sponsored by MOE.  Reduce
uncertainty by using multi model ensembles.
KAKUSHIN team EXTREMES
(1) Kakushin Team-Extremes
Time-Slice Climate Change Experiments
RCM group
CMIP3 AOGCMs Time slice Prediction of regional climate by
experiments one-way nested NHM

AGCM20km Regional Climate Model

NHM5km NHM2/1km
A GCM group
A
SST with KF w/o KF
Lower B.C. Nested in the Nested in the
AGCM20km NHM5km
Projected SST
O
AGCM/NHM are climate model versions
of the JMA operational NWP models
JMANHM; Saito et al. 2001, 2006
 Brought by convective systems
radar-echo

50km -10km

20km

The systems which bring the heavy rainfall composed of many meso-g (only
several km!) convective cells. (Kanada, 2010)
 Future issues: Some problems to 3D
bestructures,
left...
mechanisms of
averaged in a 20km-grid
mesoscale
convective systems
AGCM20km NHM5km NHM2km

can represent more

can represent intense
detailed structures
precipitation
Microphysical parameterizations in a finer-mesh model
without cumulus parameterization
– "Kessler" and "Richard and Chaumerliac“ types for the cloud-to-
precipitation processes
– Thompson et al. (2004) for the treatment of drizzle Kanada (2010)
This study was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan under
the framework of the “KAKUSHIN” program. Numerical simulations were performed using the Earth Simulator.
S-5-3 project
 (2) Project S-5-3 (MOE)
(a) To increase the accuracy of DD
RCM20s 20km
Results
MME Scenario
NIED

GCM
&
Tsukuba
Re-
analysis
data
MRI
DPRI

Comparison
Bias detection Bias Information

Two way
nesting model Observation data
(Hokkaido)
 1985～2004

Two rainy seasons

in Japan are well
represented in all
RCMs

Seasonal. Change of
RCMs and JRA-25
 The accuracy of the models
Error in surface temperature
In each
prefecture
(Monthly
mean)

Error in precip.
 Impact studies in other projects
20km
Agriculture (Rice yielding)
scenario

(b) To derive information

for use in impact studies
Statistical downscaling for rural area

Image

Hydrology (Image)
Dynamical downscaling for urban area
Global Circulation Model Further downscaling if
we need.

3km

15km

Regional Climate Model

◎ This method is effective to drive the RCM with the

urban canopy model (Kimura and Adachi)
Temp. change of the Tokyo metropolitan area
1.1C 資料：気象庁
Mean temperature
change in Japan ３Ｃ

Global
Warming
1.1C
Urbanization
1.9C
 Kimura,F and S.Adachi
Change of Urbanization to 2070’s
Urban-area/Total
rare %

1997 Estimation by
extrapolation to
2070

Daily mean: 25W/m2 Anthropogenic heat

release
LT
 Change in daily highest temperature due to Urbanization and
Global warming
Suburban area A Univ. of Tsukuba （Kimura and Adachi)

Urbanization Global warming

days Urbanization
0.5-1.0C

Global
warming
３Ｃ

Temp.

◎ The simulation suggests that the daily highest

temperature in the suburban area become 43C in 2070s
 Concluding Remarks
• In all the projects, the final goal is to offer
downscaled data for the impact model
researchers.
• For this purpose, they tried to reduce the
uncertainty remains in the downscaling
process.
• However, the approach looks different in
each project.