ABSTRACT
In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Fourth Assessment Report, a dataset of more than 20 global coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) is fully utilized to project future climate change under various scenarios (IPCC, 2007a). These AOGCM simulations were performed under the third phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). These results mitigate the error between models by averaging the output of numerous models. However, the results (especially those related to extreme weather events) can be biased by the low resolution of the models since the models’ horizontal resolution is approximately 100km to 400km. Although these models include large-scale mountains, they cannot represent small-scale mountain ranges and detailed land–sea distributions, and there is also a limit to the representation of mountainous precipitation. As a result, a high spatial resolution model is required to study extreme weather events and to project their modification as a result of climate change for adaptation studies and measures.
