Abstract
Climate model projections can be used to assess the future expected behavior of extreme precipitation due to climate change. In Europe, the EURO-CORDEX project provides precipitation projections in the future under various representative concentration pathways (RCP), through regionalized outputs of Global Climate Models (GCM) by a set of Regional Climate Models (RCM). In this work, 12 combinations of GCM and RCM under two scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) supplied by the EURO-CORDEX project are analyzed in the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands. Precipitation quantiles for a set of exceedance probabilities are estimated by using the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution function fitted by the L-moment method. Precipitation quantiles expected in the future period are compared with the precipitation quantiles in the control period, for each climate model. An approach based on Monte Carlo simulations is developed to assess the uncertainty from the climate model projections. Expected changes in the future are compared with the sampling uncertainty in the control period to identify statistically significant changes. The higher the significance threshold, the fewer cells with changes are identified. Consequently, a set of maps are obtained for various thresholds to assist the decision making process in subsequent climate change studies.
Highlights
There is general concern about how climate could change in the future
Its color represents the average error in the 12 climate models, and its size the dispersion of error values among climate models (CVe)
The first step in the assessment of precipitation projections supplied by climate models consists of
Summary
There is general concern about how climate could change in the future. The society and the ecosystems around it are vulnerable to any change in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, such as heat waves, heavy precipitation events, droughts, or wind storms, among others, as seen in recent years [1]. Modifications in the climate will drive local changes in regional weather patterns that could amplify the frequency or the magnitude of such extreme events. Local adaptation policies to climate change require the expected behavior of extreme precipitation events, due to its influence on flood risk and infrastructure safety. Global Climate Model (GCM) outputs can be useful to assess how the climate will behave in the future. GCMs are used to simulate the possible behavior of global climate in the future, from the expected temporal evolution in a set of forcing variables, such as greenhouse gas emissions. Regional Climate Models (RCM) simulate the climate behavior at a higher spatial resolution in a set of regions of the world, by using the outputs of GCMs as input data
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