TY - JOUR

T1 - Robustness of European climate projections from dynamical downscaling

AU - Christensen, Jens Hesselbjerg

AU - Larsen, Morten A.D.

AU - Christensen, Ole B.

AU - Drews, Martin

AU - Stendel, Martin

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - How climate change will unfold in the years to come is a central topic in today’s environmental debate, in particular at the regional level. While projections using large ensembles of global climate models consistently indicate a future decrease in summer precipitation over southern Europe and an increase over northern Europe, individual models substantially modulate these distinct signals of change in precipitation. So far model improvements and higher resolution from regional downscaling have not been seen as able to resolve these disagreements. In this paper we assess whether 2 decades of investments in large ensembles of downscaling experiments with regional climate model simulations for Europe have contributed to a more robust model assessment of the future climate at a range of geographical scales. We study climate change projections of European seasonal temperature and precipitation using an ensemble-suite comprised by all readily available pan-European regional model projections for the twenty-first-century, representing increasing model resolution from ~ 50 to ~ 12 km grid distance, as well as lateral boundary and sea surface temperature conditions from a variety of global model simulations. Employing a simple scaling with global mean temperature change we identify emerging robust signals of future seasonal temperature and precipitation changes also found to resemble current observed trends, where these are judged to be statistically significant.

AB - How climate change will unfold in the years to come is a central topic in today’s environmental debate, in particular at the regional level. While projections using large ensembles of global climate models consistently indicate a future decrease in summer precipitation over southern Europe and an increase over northern Europe, individual models substantially modulate these distinct signals of change in precipitation. So far model improvements and higher resolution from regional downscaling have not been seen as able to resolve these disagreements. In this paper we assess whether 2 decades of investments in large ensembles of downscaling experiments with regional climate model simulations for Europe have contributed to a more robust model assessment of the future climate at a range of geographical scales. We study climate change projections of European seasonal temperature and precipitation using an ensemble-suite comprised by all readily available pan-European regional model projections for the twenty-first-century, representing increasing model resolution from ~ 50 to ~ 12 km grid distance, as well as lateral boundary and sea surface temperature conditions from a variety of global model simulations. Employing a simple scaling with global mean temperature change we identify emerging robust signals of future seasonal temperature and precipitation changes also found to resemble current observed trends, where these are judged to be statistically significant.

KW - Climate projections

KW - CORDEX

KW - ENSEMBLES

KW - Pattern scaling

KW - PRUDENCE

KW - Regional climate model ensembles

U2 - 10.1007/s00382-019-04831-z

DO - 10.1007/s00382-019-04831-z

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85066474480

VL - 53

SP - 4857

EP - 4869

JO - Climate Dynamics

JF - Climate Dynamics

SN - 0930-7575

IS - 7-8

ER -