The Netherlands

Abstract

Abstract In order to be able to simulate long-term climate, it is necessary to model the evolution of both the atmospheric and hydrological variables in their fundamentally two-way interactive setting and to model the significant heterogeneity of land surface characteristics. A two-way feedback mode and the heterogeneity in a computational mesh are important keys to stable and realistic simulation. The coupling based on areally-averaged conservation equations was applied to a regional-scale atmospheric model for the main islands of Japan. Atmospheric-hydrological processes observed at Tsukuba station were compared with their counterparts simulated by the coupled model with a 20 x 20 km" resolution for the January 1989 historical period. The results of this comparison are quite satisfactory. Then, the model of Japan was run to simulate the climate change over Japan under the scenario of the doubling of C0 2 concentration in the atmosphere