Towards Robust Regional Climate Change Information for Europe
Abstract
The regional manifestation of climate change projections for Europe consistently indicates a future decrease in summer precipitation over southern Europe and an increase over northern Europe. However, individual models substantially modulate these overarching precipitation change signals; E.g. some models are dominated by a strong shift in the NAO circulation, while others exhibit only small changes in atmospheric circulation. Despite considerable model improvements as well as higher and higher resolution in regional downscaling efforts, so far these apparent inconsistencies seems unresolved. Analysing European seasonal temperature and precipitation climate change projections using all readily available pan-European regional model projections for the twenty-first-century with model resolution increasing from ∼50km to ∼12km grid distance within the PRUDENCE, ENSEMBLES and CORDEX projects allows for a in depth understanding of what may be the most robust projection of future climate. Employing a simple scaling with global mean temperature change enables the identification of emerging robust signals of seasonal temperature and precipitation change. Likewise, the "what-if?" approach, i.e. analysing the climate change signal from transient experiments at the time of an emerging global temperature exceedance of i.e. 1, 2 or 3 degrees offers a policy relevant approach to provide less ambiguous projections. Comparing the projections from these two approaches have not been done in a comprehensive manner and is the subject of the present paper.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.A24I..01C
- Keywords:
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- 3305 Climate change and variability;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 3355 Regional modeling;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 1622 Earth system modeling;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1637 Regional climate change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE