Added value of convection-permitting simulations for understanding future urban humidity extremes: case studies for Berlin and its surroundings

Abstract

Climate extremes affected cities and their populations during the last decades. Future climate projections indicate climate extremes will increasingly impact urban areas during the 21st century. Humidity related fluctuations and extremes directly underpin convective processes, as well as can influence human health conditions. Regional climate models are a powerful tool to understand regional-to-local climate change processes for cities and their surroundings. Convection-permitting regional climate models, operating on very high resolutions, indicate improved simulation of convective extremes, particularly on sub-daily timescales and in regions with complex terrain such as cities. This research aims to understand how crossing spatial resolutions from ~12.5 km to ~3 km grid size affect humidity extremes and related variables under future climate change for urban areas and its surroundings. Taking Berlin and its surroundings as the case study area, the research identifies two categories of unprecedented future extreme atmospheric humidity conditions happening under 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C mean warming based on statistical distributions, respectively near surface specific humidity >0.02 kg/kg and near surface relative humidity <30%. Two example cases for each future extreme condition are dynamically downscaled for a two months period from the 0.44° horizontal resolution following a double-nesting approach: first to the 0.11° (~12.5 km) horizontal resolution with the regional climate model REMO and thereafter to the 0.0275° (~3 km) horizontal resolution with the non-hydrostatic version of REMO. The findings show that crossing spatial resolutions from ~12.5 km to ~3 km grid size affects humidity extremes and related variables under climate change. Generally, a stronger decrease in moisture (up to 0.0007–0.005 kg/kg SH and 10–20% RH) and an increase in temperature (1–2 °C) is found on the 0.0275° compared to the 0.11° horizontal resolution, which is more profound in Berlin than in the surroundings. The convection-permitting scale mitigates the specific humidity moist extreme and intensifies the relative humidity dry extreme in Berlin, posing challenges with respect to health for urban dwellers.