Abstract
Abstract. The frequency of extreme events has changed, having a direct impact on human lives. Regional climate models help us to predict these regional climate changes. This work presents an atmosphere–ocean coupled regional climate system model (RCSM; with the atmospheric component COSMO-CLM and the ocean component NEMO) over the European domain, including three marginal seas: the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Sea. To test the model, we evaluate a simulation of more than 100 years (1900–2009) with a spatial grid resolution of about 25 km. The simulation was nested into a coupled global simulation with the model MPI-ESM in a low-resolution configuration, whose ocean temperature and salinity were nudged to the ocean–ice component of the MPI-ESM forced with the NOAA 20th Century Reanalysis (20CR). The evaluation shows the robustness of the RCSM and discusses the added value by the coupled marginal seas over an atmosphere-only simulation. The coupled system is stable for the complete 20th century and provides a better representation of extreme temperatures compared to the atmosphere-only model. The produced long-term dataset will help us to better understand the processes leading to meteorological and climate extremes.
Highlights
Regional climate directly affects human lives and socioeconomic conditions
In the Mediterranean, it even matches the ensemble mean of the CMIP5 global simulations, and in the Baltic, it is within the spread of this ensemble
To better understand how the Earth climate system evolves at local to regional scales, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of the interactions among the different components of the system
Summary
Regional climate directly affects human lives and socioeconomic conditions. The natural variability of the climate system impacts local weather. Due to the recent changes in the frequency and intensity of local extreme events (Tebaldi et al, 2006; Hartmann et al, 2013; Casanueva et al, 2014), like storms or heavy rainfall, we aim at a better understanding of climate system dynamics. The main components of the Earth climate system are the atmosphere, land, ocean, and rivers. To have a better representation of the interactions between the atmosphere and the rest of components of the Earth climate system, it would be necessary to couple models representing all components. This is highly complex since it requires combining different numerical models, which may bring instabilities, and implies high computational costs. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) established the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) as a standardized experimental protocol for studying the output of coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation mod-
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