jeong-soo park, Youngsaeng Lee, Jayeong Paek

We analyze annual extremes of daily maximum and minimum surface air temperature and of daily rainfall in East Asia and the Korean peninsula. This study made intensive use of the simulation data available from the CMIP5 (Coupled Model intercomparison Project Phase 5) multimodels in historical and future experiments up to year 2100, employing three different radiative forcings: RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 (representative concentration pathways). Several reanalysis datasets are used to compare and evaluate the simulated climate extremes in the late 20th century. We estimate the future changes in precipitation and temperature extremes in East Asia and
Korea, and compare them to the global result, for the reference period 1986--2005. The rising rate of future cold extremes over East Asia and Korea is faster than that of warm extremes. This phenomenon appears more distinctly in Korea as a local scale, indicating more sensitivity of the Korean penisula to global warming. The increase of the 20-year return level of maximum precipitation in the CMIP5 over East Asia by the end of 21st century are about 7\% in the RCP2.6, 15\% in the RCP4.5, and 35\% in the RCP8.5 experiments, which exceed the corresponding global values. We also estimate the changes in precipitation extremes across East Asia as a function of the annual mean temperature variation at the same location. The CMIP5 sensitivity in maximum precipitation across East Asia is 5.5$\%/{^\circ} \rm C$, which is lower than the global figure 5.8$\%/{^\circ} \rm C$). The sensitivity for the Korean peninsula is 7.38$\%/{^\circ}\rm C$, indicating the strong impact of global warming to Korea. The results will
be important in mitigating the detrimental effects of variations of climatic extremes and in improving the regional strategy for water resource and eco-environmental management, particulaly for such areas in East Asia under significant changes in temperature and rainfall extremes.