Evaluation and Projection of Surface Wind Speed Over China Based on CMIP6 GCMs

Abstract Surface wind speed has great impacts on the economy, environment, and society around the world. Based on 24 global climate models (GCMs) from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), this paper assesses the historical surface wind speed over China, and quantifies the advancements of CMIP6 over CMIP5. In addition, future changes of surface wind speed under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway scenarios of 1‐2.6, 2‐4.5, and 5‐8.5 (SSP1‐2.6, SSP2‐4.5, and SSP5‐8.5) are also provided, by using 18 out of the 24 models with all three scenarios. Results show that multimodel ensemble mean of CMIP6 can well capture the spatial distributions of the annual, summer, and winter surface wind speed and generally performs better than both the median of the individual CMIP6 GCMs and multimodel ensemble mean of CMIP5 in monthly, seasonal, and annual wind climatology. However, CMIP6 GCMs fail to reproduce the observed decreasing trends, in terms of magnitude and/or sign. Meanwhile, the annual cycle of the surface wind speed simulated by CMIP6 GCMs falsely demonstrates the maximum in winter instead of spring. In the context of global warming, surface wind speed is projected to decrease in most parts of China in the middle and late 21st century under the three scenarios. Moreover, the trends of wind speed averaged over China will decrease significantly in both annual and winter under all three scenarios, but it will increase significantly in summer under SSP5‐8.5.