Evaluation of cordex-SEA models on rainfall and temperature simulations under RCP 2.6 in Royal Belum State Park

Royal Belum State Park (RBSP) is one of the oldest rainforests, known as land rich in biodiversity, situated in the central north of Peninsular Malaysia with many iconic but threatened wildlife and plant species. The projection of rising in temperature have the potential to disrupt the crucial ecological functions, temperature, and water cycle of RBSP, possessing a great threat to the species survival. However, there is lack of understanding on climatological impacts in RBSP due to insufficient availability of long-term climate data. Therefore, this study aims to assess the climatological trends of rainfall and temperature for three datasets: observed data obtained from Asian Precipitation-Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) and simulated data derived from the Coordinated Regional Downscalling Experiment Southeast Asia (CORDEX-SEA) models: MPI-M-MPI-ESM-MR (MPI) and MOHC-HadGEM2-ES (HadGEM) in RBSP between 1976-2005. This study also assessed the performance of CORDEX-SEA models in simulating both parameters during the historical period using different evaluation metrics: bias (BIAS), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Spearman’s correlation (R) against the APHRODITE data. The result shows that most of the datasets reveals an increasing trend, meanwhile MPI rainfall and HadGEM temperature data show a decreasing trend. The performance evaluation metrics implied that MPI simulation outperforms HadGEM in simulating both parameters. This study serves as a valuable tool for adapting and developing mitigation measures to ensure sustainable and resilient functioning of RBSP’s ecological functions.