The globally confronted climate crisis has rendered substantial transformation to humanity and ecosystems because of climatic and hydrological changes. Currently, the Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has collected ...
The globally confronted climate crisis has rendered substantial transformation to humanity and ecosystems because of climatic and hydrological changes. Currently, the Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has collected scientific evidence to substantiate the anomalies caused by climate change based on diverse studies and investigation to warn of the dangers of climate change. Such climate change is closely related to the water cycle. Changes in the water cycle have been further accelerated, predominantly due to variability in precipitation cycles and changes in the depth and frequency of extreme climate events. Furthermore, these extreme changes in the water cycle have a direct impact on hydrological factors. Hence, climate and water researchers mainly applied the CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) GCM (General Circulation Model) to characterize changes in future climate and hydrological factors reflecting climate change.
CMIP6 GCM has improved its performance than the previous version. Moreover, it provided more realistic climate variables by combining diverse socio-economic factors with a high abstraction of scientific concepts for greenhouse gas scenarios. Thus, comparing the performance of CMIP5 and CMIP6 GCMs to identify improvements in CMIP6 can secure the accuracy and reliability of research in assessing the impact of climate change in South Korea, and it can be established reasonable climate change policies based on this. The projected future evapotranspiration using the improved CMIP6 GCM can identify changes in the hydrological cycle depending on greenhouse gas scenarios in South Korea. Furthermore, estimating the future climate and potential evapotranspiration on a global scale can more accurately identify future climate and hydrological cycles due to radiative forcing by latitude and greenhouse gas pathways, and it can determine the vulnerability to climate change by latitude and region.
This study was conducted with the following two themes. The first is to identify the improvement points of CMIP6 by comparing the performance of CMIP5 and CMIP6 GCM in diverse ways. Furthermore, the TW (Thornthwaite), HS (Hargreaves-Samani), and PM (Penman-Monteith) methods were used to estimate evapotranspiration at 22 stations in South Korea. The performance of evapotranspiration was compared in the historical period, and the uncertainties were quantified using a reliability ensemble average. Second, to analyze changes in climate and hydrological factors in a broader area, the scope of research was expanded to a global unit with global climate and hydrological variability being compared utilizing multiple CMIP6 GCMs.
As a result of the performance of comparison between CMIP5 and CMIP6 GCMs, CMIP6 GCM had better reproducibility than CMIP5 GCM in the historical period (1970-2005). Using REA (Reliability Ensemble Average) and statistical methods, SSP and RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) scenarios with uncertainties about the future climate being quantified. Consequently, it was discovered that the SSP scenario has lower uncertainty than the RCP scenario. Furthermore, based on the climate variables of CMIP6 GCM, TW, PM, and HS were used to calculate the change in future potential evapotranspiration. The changes in TW and PM were increased in the future compared to the historical period, whereas the change in HS resulted in the opposite results. The uncertainties in PM were the lowest than those of other methods. On the other hand, the uncertainties in HS were the highest in both periods.
According to the results of future changes in global climate variables and potential evapotranspiration, future changes in global precipitation and temperature analyzed by latitude based on 25 CMIP6 GCMs have all augmented compared to the historical period. In particular, high latitudes in the northern hemisphere were located to be the most vulnerable to climate change. Furthermore, in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, annual precipitation is projected to be less in the future than in the past, while average temperatures have increased. Hence, the Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes predicted a drier climate in the future than in the past. Furthermore, this study estimated potential evapotranspiration using HS and PM in the historical and future based on 6 climate variables of 14 CMIP6 GCMs. Owing to this fact, PM and HS for SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0 exhibited the same thermal energy at low northern latitudes. The projected future evapotranspiration ignores seasonal trends in evapotranspiration estimated in the historical period. What’s more, the thermal energy for the water cycle remained high for all scenarios and most latitudes except SSP1-2.6.