Selecting CMIP6-Based Future Climate Scenarios for Impact and Adaptation Studies

Abstract

Climate change impact assessment studies often use future projections of only a few global climate models (GCMs) due to limited research resources. Here we develop a novel method to select a small subset of GCMs that widely capture the uncertainty range of large ensemble. By applying this method, we select a subset of five GCM projections from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble for impact and adaptation studies in Japan. At first, we omit GCMs whose global warming projections have been evaluated to be overestimated in the recent literature. Then, we select a subset of five GCMs that widely captures the uncertainty ranges for 8 climate variables and have good performances in present-climate simulations. These selected GCM simulations will be used to provide better climate scenarios for impact and adaptation studies than those in the previous impact assessment project.