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General circulation models (GCMs) are developed to simulate the past climate and generate future climate predictions. In the context of global warming, their important roles in identifying possible solutions to water resources planning/management are recognized by the world. However, in actual and regional implementation, due to many factors like initial and boundary conditions, parameters and model structures and so forth, there are great variabilities and uncertainties across the future climate projections of GCMs outputs, which has attracted criticism from water resources planners. Thus, the GCMs usually must be evaluated for assessing their performances in simulating the historical observations. Currently, there are many different conclusions and opinions as to whether the optimal individual model is more advantageous or whether the combined consideration of MME works better. The purpose of this paper is to compare the advantages and disadvantages between the selection of the optimal single GCM and multi‐model ensemble (MME) based on one of the more objective selection methods called TOPSIS. The results show that the performances of GCMs in simulating precipitation and temperature in different climate subregions over China are not identical. For CMIP6 GCMs simulations, the optimal precipitation GCM is CMCC‐CM2‐SR5 for EC, MIROC6 for SC, SWC and NWC, CESM2‐WACCM for NC and NEC, and FGOALS‐g3 for QTP. As for temperature, only NESM3 and BCC‐ESM1 are the optimal GCM for QTP and NWC, respectively; in other subregions, MME is better than single GCM. In general, a simple arithmetic averaging approach employed to generate the MME model is not superior to the optimal GCM, although the error metric with the observed data is reduced, at the cost of a severe compression of the interannual variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wetland ecosystem is particularly vulnerable to hydrological and climate changes. The Great Xing'an Mountain is such a region in China that has a large area of wetlands with rare human disturbance. The predictions of the global circulation model CGCM3 (the third-generation coupled global climate model from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis) indicated that the temperature in The Great Xing'an Mountain will rise by 2-4°C over the next 100 years. This paper predicts the potential distributions of wetlands in this area under the current and warming climate conditions. This predication was performed by the Random Forests model, with 18 environmental variables, which will reflect the climate and topography conditions. The model has been proven to have a great prediction ability. The wetland distributions are primarily topography-driven in the Great Xing'an Mountains. Mean annual temperature, warmness index, and potential evapotranspiration ratio are the most important climatic factors in wetland distributions. The model predictions for three future climate scenarios show that the wetland area tends to decrease, and higher emission will also cause more drastic shrinkage of wetland distributions. About 30% of the wetland area will disappear by 2050. The area will decrease 62.47, 76.90, and 85.83%, respectively, under CGCM3-B1, CGCM3-A1B, and CGCM3-A2 by 2100. As for spatial allocation, wetlands may begin to disappear from the sides to the center and south to north under a warming climate. Under CGCM3-B1, the loss of wetlands may mainly occur in the south hills with flatter terrain, and some may occur in the north hills and intermontane plains. Under CGCM3-A1B, severe vanish of wetlands is predicted. Under CGCM3-A2, only a small area of wetlands may remain in the north of the high mountains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]