Evaluation of the Tourism Climate Index over Japan in a Future Climate Using a Statistical Downscaling Method

The tourism sector is sensitive to the effects of climate change. This is the first study that examines the relationship between tourism and climate change over Japan using data from projections of future climate. We apply a statistical downscaling method to climate model data and estimate how tourism on a city-scale over Japan may be affected by the expected near-future global warming. We used the tourism climate index (TCI) to evaluate the effect of meteorological factors on tourism. We estimated TCI using data from observatories of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), and compared it with monthly changes in tourist number at Morioka city, and annual variations in tourists at 38 areas in Japan. In general, TCI shows a positive correlation with tourists numbers, although the correlation depends on location. In mountainous regions such as Osorezan and Tsurugizan, TCI is clearly correlated with the number of tourists. As expected, TCI under present climate conditions identifies summer as the most comfortable season for tourism. We also estimate TCI under future climate conditions (around the year 2040) using data from the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC) and five climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CMIP3). For future climate over large areas of Japan, TCI generally increases in spring/autumn and decreases in summer because effective temperature move into the comfortable and uncomfortable range, respectively. This indicates that the comfortable season for tourists will change in the future from summer to spring and autumn. TCI in the winter season showed large variance between models owing to differences in predicted temperatures in the models.