Annual Report 2012 - City University of Hong Kong

Executive Summary
This is the fourth annual report issued by the Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre and covers the
activities of the Centre in 2012. During the year, we continued to work on various climate problems on both the
regional (the Asia-Pacific region) and global scales. In the area of typhoon prediction, we investigated the possibility
of real-time dynamical seasonal forecasting of typhoon activity and studied the possibility of using pre-season sea-
surface temperature to predict typhoon activity. We also identified how typhoon activities (genesis, intensity, track
and landfall) can be modified by various atmospheric oscillations. On more general climate problems, we analyzed
how the moisture transport anomalies in the Asia-Pacific region modified the rainfall, and established the climatology
and characteristics of the blocking events over Ural-Siberia that are crucial in understanding the cold weather in
China. We continued to run both global and regional models in efforts to understand the global-scale phenomena as
well as to develop capability to perform downscaling (statistical and dynamical) predictions of precipitation. We have
been expanding our efforts in studying how local and regional air pollution can affect local and regional climate, both
from measurements and modeling perspectives. As in the past, the main results from each of the projects are briefly
described in this report. The papers produced from these projects are available either from the CD attached to the
report or from our website.
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