Recent Advances in Regional Climate Modeling and Applications
区域气候模拟研究及其应用进展

Significant advances have been made in regional climate modeling research during the past decades.Numerous regional climate models(RCMs)have now become an important tool for climate research and operational prediction after extensive model developments and verifications.Many encouraging results have been published in simulating historic extreme climate events and predicting our future climate,particularly in the monthly to seasonal climate variables.By analyzing the high-resolution,dynamically consistent model datasets,remarkable improvements have been made in understanding various physics processes,such as land-surface and hydrological processes,the planetary boundary layer,clouds and precipitation,cloud-radiation interaction at the weekly to seasonal scales.However,RCMs still face many challenging issues due to the complicated scale interaction over a large-range temporal and spatial scales(e.g.,from mesoscale to synoptic and planetary scale disturbances),the interaction of individual climate sub-systems(e.g.,atmosphere,biosphere,water,ice-snow,land-surface),and the lack of understanding of some complex physical processes,especially clouds and soil moisture.This article summarizes the recent progress in the present and future climate simulation,the extreme weather and climate studies,and in understanding various physics processes as well as the short-term climate prediction using RCMs.The prospects of RCMs related to the above subjects,especially the weekly to subseasonal regional climate simulation and prediction,will also be discussed.