New progresses in high-resolution simulation of regional climate over the Tibetan Plateau

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the "Roof of the World" and the "Third Pole," plays a significant role in the regional, East Asian, and even global climate due to the thermal and dynamic forcing mechanisms generated by its unique terrain. Against the backdrop of worsening global warming, the Tibetan Plateau is characterized by an obvious warming and wetting trend, with frequent occurrences of extreme heat and precipitation events. Simultaneously, there has been a notable reduction in snow cover, leading to glacier retreat, accelerated permafrost thawing, and shortened soil freezing periods, resulting in more frequent meteorological and related disasters, attracting widespread attention from the international community and scientific circles. However, global climate simulation results for the Tibetan Plateau show considerable uncertainty. Due to the plateau"s complex terrain, global climate models, with their coarse spatial resolution and rudimentary representation of physical processes, struggle to accurately capture the mesoscale and small-scale weather and climate effects. Compared to global climate models, regional climate models offer higher spatial resolution, better depicting detailed regional terrain features such as local topography and surface conditions, thus more effectively reflecting regional climate characteristics. With advances in computational resources and supercomputing capabilities, the horizontal resolution of regional climate simulations has improved to the kilometer scale, reducing model simulation errors. This paper first introduces discussions and evaluations of resolution in regional climate simulations of the Tibetan Plateau, noting that increasing the horizontal resolution of regional climate models can indeed improve the accuracy of simulating the plateau"s climate characteristics to some extent, especially in regions with complex terrain and frequent convective activity. However, comprehensive and objective evaluations are still needed. Additionally, the paper discusses improvements in model physical processes from the perspectives of land surface, cloud cover, and microphysics schemes. Finally, it addresses the challenges and future directions in regional climate simulation research for the Tibetan Plateau.