Model experiments on climate change in the Tokyo metropolitan area using regional climate scenarios

There is a possibility that the future atmospheric warming leads to more frequent heavy rainfall in the metropolitan area, thereby increasing the risk of floods. As part of REsearch Program on Climate Change Adaptation (RECCA) funded by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, we started numerical model experiments for investigating the vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in water hazard assessments in the metropolitan area by the use of regional climate scenarios. The model experiments adopt dynamical downscaling techniques. Future climate projections obtained from regional climate model simulations at 20 km horizontal grid spacing are downscaled into finer grids (less than 5 km resolutions) of Regional Atmospheric Modeling System Version 6.0 modified by National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED-RAMS). Prior to performing the dynamical downscaling experiments, the NIED-RAMS model biases are evaluated by comparing long-term surface meteorological observations with results of the model simulations that are carried out by using the Japanese Re-Analysis (JRA) data and Japan Meteorological Agency Meso-Scale Model outputs as the initial and boundary conditions.