During phase II of the Regional Climate Model Inter-comparison Project （RMIP） for Asia, the Asian climate was estimated from July 1988 to December 1998 using six climate models. In this paper, the abilities of six climate models to simulate several important ex- treme climate events in China during the last years of the last century were analyzed. The modeled results for the intensity of the precipitation anomaly over the Yang- tze-Huaihe Valley during the summers of 1991 and 1998 were weaker than the observed values. The positive pre- cipitation anomaly responsible for a catastrophic flood in 1991 was well reproduced in almost all simulation results, but the intensity and range of the precipitation anomaly in 1998 were weaker in the modeled results. The spatial dis- tribution of extreme climate events in 1997, when severe drought affected North China and flood impacted South China, was reproduced by most of the regional models because the anomaly of the large-scale background field was well-simulated, despite poor simulation of high temperature areas in the north during the summer by all models.
Based on a 10-year simulation of six Regional Climate Models(RCMs) in phase II of the Regional Climate Model Inter-Comparison Project(RMIP) for Asia,the multivariate statistical method of common principal components(CPCs) is used to analyze and compare the spatiotemporal characteristics of temperature and precipitation simulated by multi-RCMs over China,including the mean climate states and their seasonal transition,the spatial distribution of interannual variability,and the interannual variation.CPC is an effective statistical tool for analyzing the results of different models.Compared with traditional statistical methods,CPC analyses provide a more complete statistical picture for observation and simulation results.The results of CPC analyses show that the climatological means and the characteristics of seasonal transition over China can be accurately simulated by RCMs.However,large biases exist in the interannual variation in certain years or for individual models.
