The First-Flowering Dates for the Major Fruit Trees in Korea Projected By Rcms.

An impact of global warming on the first-flowering date (FFD) of cherry, peach and pear in northeastern Asia are investigated using the Korean national scenario. For the study, we used the dynamically downscaled daily temperature with 12.5km horizontal resolution derived from five regional climate models (RCMs) under the same lateral forcing from HadGEM2-AO on the basis of Historical (1981-2010) and four RCP (2021-2100) scenarios. According to our analysis of the historical simulations, the five RCMs and phenological model have good capability in simulating temperature and FFD with uncertainties of about 2.4-3.4 °C and 8.4-13.9 days, respectively, while well reflecting the topographical effect. On the basis of the highest emission scenario (RCP8.5), temperature increments of 4.8 °C induce an acceleration in blooming rate, thereby advancing the FFDs of cherry, peach and pear by the end of the 21st century by about 14.5, 15.8 and 14.5 days, respectively, compared to the current reference simulation (Historical). We found high availability of the Korean national scenarios with moderate reliability. We believe that the next generation of the Korean national downscaling project considering diverse lateral forcing will offer better performance and more useful projections to end users

 This work was carried out with the support of Rural Development Administration Cooperative Research Program for Agriculture Science and Technology Development under Grant Project No. PJ009953, Republic of Korea.