INVESTIGATION ON THE EFFECT OF REPRESENTATIVE CONCENTRATION PATHWAYS (RCPs) TO THE CLIMATE RESEARCH: CASE STUDY AT MALAYSIA

This study assesses the role of RCPs as an important development of climate research. RCP presents the specific radiation forcing as possible scenarios that would lead to the climate formulation known as RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. In recent years, the climate research in Malaysia were generated using Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) under the A1B scenario. However, these scenarios had been revised and AR5 was introduced since 2014 to overcome the weakness in the AR4. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to identify the effect of RCPs on climate generation and the best RCPs for each state in Malaysia based on a statistical climate model. The Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM) was used as a climate driver to downscale the long-term local climates concerning the potential emission changes in the local weather. Results showed that 4 out of 10 states agreed that the RCP2.6 had a good correlation to the local climate with higher R (> 0.8) and lower %MAE (< 23%). This finding proved that RCPs play a main role in the long-term climate assessment.