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Background

      East Asia is located in the southeast part of the Eurasian continent. It is bordered on the east by the Pacific Ocean and on the southwest by the Tibetan Plateau. The unique geographic features produce distinct climate characteristics over this region. A workshop was held on 18–20 October 1994 at the State University of New York at Albany to discuss this topic, and the participants agreed to embark a collaborative research project, “General Circulation Model (GCM) Simulations of the East Asian Climate (EAC)”. The objectives are to assess the ability of GCMs to simulate EAC, and to study the mechanisms and factors that cause the multi-scales climate variability. The project was subsequently listed as the Subproject #25 in the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP)–Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) with Profs. Wei-Chyung Wang and Guoxiong Wu as the Coordinators; and Yihui Ding, Huang-Hsiung Hsu, Akio Kitoh, and Jeong-Woo Kim as members. From 2008 to 2009 Profs. Huang-Hsiung Hsu and Bin Wang are the EAC Coordinators; from 2009 to present  Profs. Huang-Hsiung Hsu and Jianping Li are the EAC Coordinators.

       Over the years, twelve workshops were organized to present and discuss collaborative research progress; and three journal Special Issues were published: 2001 and 2008 in Climate Dynamics, and 2004 in the Journal of Climate.

The active participating groups in EAC include:

• State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
• College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing
• National Climate Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing
• Center for Earth System Science, and Ministry of Education Key Laborotary for Earth System Modeling, Tsinghua University, Beijing
• Institute of Environment, Energy and Sustainability, and Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, Taipei
• Department of Atmospheric Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei
• Department of Earth Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei
• Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, State University of New York, Albany
• Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore
• International Pacific Research Center, and Department of Meterology, University of Hawaii at Monoa, Honolulu
• Center for Climate System Research, University of Tokyo, Tokyo
• Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba
• Division of Earth Environmental System, Pusan National University, Busan
• Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Yonsei Univerisity, Seoul
• School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang

Objectives

The project has three main objectives:

• To study the mechanisms and impacts of the EAC variability, especially for some extreme events. 
• To understand the change of the EAC variability under global warming.
• To assess the technique of detection and the ability of current GCMs in simulating the EAC, and to discuss the predictbatility of the EAC.