Regional integrated environmental modeling system: development and application.

The demand for high-confidence regional climate change scenarios is increasing. It is therefore vitally important to better understand the behavior of Earth's climate system on regional scale and advance the knowledge of regional responses to global climate. With their ability to represent meso-scale forcings, such as coastline, complex topography, anthropogenic aerosols and land cover/use changes, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are developed and used worldwide to investigate the effects of the above-mentioned meso-scale forcings on the local circulations that regulate the regional distribution of climatic variables. Considering the complexity of Asian Monsoon system, which is not only a physical process but also modulated by the interaction among physical, biological, chemical and social processes, a modeling framework Regional Integrated Environmental Modeling System (RIEMS) was proposed, developed and well tested before it was widely used in regional climate studies in the East Asia monsoon region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]