Annual Variation of Surface Water

1
Annual Variation of Surface Water in the Asian
Continent
Ho-Jeong Shin Climate_at_dreamwiz.com Department of
Atmospheric Sciences Yonsei University
2
Motivation

• Hydrological changes (IPCC 2001) are evident more
  or less everywhere. Being climatic changes, they
  are threats to the present ecological and human
  community, and thus, to be predicted for survival
  of the community.

Purpose

• To investigate the climatological annual mean and
  variation of surface water cycle for the Asian
  continent and its constituent climatic types
  using a GCM simulation data.

3
Water Cycle and Budgets
All the hydrological results are in mm/day.
4
Data

• YONU AGCM AMIP II standard output
• Variables precipitation, evaporation, runoff,
  snowmelt, soil moisture
• Frequency Climatology calculated with monthly
  mean fields
• Period January 1979 to December 1995
• Domain Asian continent (8.5N-90N, 20E-180W)

Method

• Calculate areal mean values averaged over each
  climatic regions obtained by Koeppen climate
  classification

5
Koeppen Climate Classification of Asian Continent
Simulated with YONU AGCM
6
Climatological Annual Mean Values of Hydrological
Variables Averaged over Each Climatic Region A
to E in the column heads are the climate types
and T is for the averaged values over the entire
Asian continent. Units are mm/day
7
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Asian Continent
8
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Tropical Rainy Region
9
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Dry Region
10
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Meso-thermal Region
11
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Micro-thermal Region
12
Climatological Annual Variations of Hydrological
Variables in the Polar Region
13
Concluding Remark

• The hydrological cycle in the Asian continent has
  been investigated in this study.
• According to the results and the previous studies
  (e.g. Hendrick and DenAngelis 1976), the snowmelt
  is important as a seasonal characteristic of
  hydrology in the cold regions at high latitudes.
  Accumulated snow amount and surface temperature
  may need to be added to look into the seasonal
  characteristics of climatic regions (Hendrick and
  DenAngelis 1976).