A new methodology for climate model selection and application to temperature of Europe

Abstract

The accuracy of the climate impact models depends on the representative power of the climate model used in the analysis. Many problems in these impact models can be eliminated by the selection of the appropriate climate models as an input. The main purpose of this research is to find a methodology to select the more representative climate models. In recent years, the quantity and quality of climate models have significantly improved. In several projects, many different Global Climate Model (GCM)–Regional Climate Model (GCM) combinations have been carried out. One of these recent comprehensive projects is CORDEX. The monthly temperature outputs of various GCM-RCM combinations over Europe between the years 1976 and 2005 were used in this paper for the determination of the more representative combinations. E-OBS is used as the observation data set in this research. Using the proposed method, a clear difference between the more, moderately, and less representative model combinations could be obtained. To model the future temperature climatology of Europe, the best choice of the analysis method is using MPI as GCM and either REMO or CCLM5 as RCM over the whole domain. According to our analysis, the best representative climate model combination can be performed by running MPI-CCLM5 combination over the EURO-CORDEX domain.