Abstract
According to observational and model-based studies, the eastern Mediterranean region is one of the most prominent climate-change hotspots in the world. The combined effect of warming and drying is expected to augment the regional impacts of global warming. In addition to changes in mean climatic conditions, global warming is likely to induce changes in several aspects of extreme rainfall such as duration and magnitude. In this context, we explore the impact of climate change on precipitation with the use of several indicators. We focus on Cyprus, a water-stressed island located in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. Our results are derived from a new high-resolution simulation for the 21st century, which is driven by a “business-as-usual” scenario. In addition to a strong temperature increase (up to 4.1 °C), our analysis highlights that, on average for the island, most extreme precipitation indicators decrease, suggesting a transition to much drier conditions. The absolute daily rainfall maxima exhibit strong local variability, indicating the need for high resolution simulations to understand the potential impacts on future flooding.
Highlights
The broader region of the Mediterranean, and the eastern part of the basin, is a well-known climate change hotspot [1,2]
While the climate projections for temperature are quite robust and their signal is significant, this is not the case for precipitation, which is found to be mainly driven by internal climate variability [5,7]
High-resolution regional climate simulations are essential for assessing changes in precipitation, for locations of high topography and complex coastlines that are common in the Mediterranean
Summary
The broader region of the Mediterranean, and the eastern part of the basin, is a well-known climate change hotspot [1,2]. A number of studies have indicated that global warming induced changes in extreme rainfall are expected, while the signal of these changes could be larger or even opposite to the one for mean changes [8,9,10,11,12]. High-resolution regional climate simulations are essential for assessing changes in precipitation, for locations of high topography and complex coastlines that are common in the Mediterranean. A better representation of extreme events by dynamical downscaling through regional climate models is evident in a number of studies [14,15,16,17]
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