A future climate scenario of regional changes in extreme climate events over China using the PRECIS climate model

Based on the PRECIS climate model system, we simulate the distribution of the present (1961 similar to 1990) and future (2071 similar to 2100) extreme climate events in China under the IPCC SRES B2 scenario. The results show that for the present case PRECIS simulates well the spatial distribution of extreme climate events when compared with observations. In the future the occurrence of hot events is projected to be more frequent and the growing season will lengthen, while the occurrence of cold events is likely to be much rarer. A warming environment will also give rise to changes in extreme precipitation events. There would be an overall increasing trend in extreme precipitation events over most of China. The southeast coastal zone, the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River and North China are projected to experience more extreme precipitation than the present.