Research

Work Packages 1–9

Work Package 3

Climate Research and Modelling – IMK- IFU /KIT, IMHEN, ITT, IHP

Temperature as well as precipitation patterns are expected to change in a changing climate. Climate change and climate variability, especially regions strongly dependent on agriculture, such as the VGTB basin, are likely to have profound impacts on surface water balance as well as on the regional agricultural productivity, and consequently on food security.
For this reason it becomes very important to understand the regional climate and its interaction with large scale atmospheric and/or oceanic patterns in the VGTB basin of Vietnam. Thus, this WP aimed at analyzing historical and future climate patterns in the VGTB basin. The output of GCMs, however, was too coarse for regional and local impact studies. Therefore, dynamical downscaling (DDS) and statistical downscaling (SDS) have been implemented to overcome resolution issues. The measuring network has been improved by installing further climate stations and several rain gauges in the upstream parts of the Vu Gia and the Thu Bon. Projections and analysis of extreme events directly impacted on the bandwidth of possible economically sound land-use scenarios in the VGTB.

Different objectives have been achieved:

• Additional climate stations and rain gauges have been installed in order to improve the data situation.
• A qualitative analysis of available historical records has been performed (quality check and homogeneity testing).
• Historical records have been analyzed, a transient climate simulation has been performed and reliable meteorological data has been provided.
• The preliminary work for the transient WRF simulations such as domain setup, sub grid scale parameterization, computer resources estimation, etc. is finished.