Abstract
Abstract. This study analyzes future climate for the Mediterranean region projected with the high-resolution coupled CM2.5 model, which incorporates a new and improved land model (LM3). The simulated climate changes suggest pronounced warming and drying over most of the region. However, the changes are distinctly smaller than those of the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble. In addition, the changes over much of southeast and central Europe indicate very modest warming compared to the CMIP5 projections and also a tendency toward wetter conditions. These differences indicate a possible role of factors such as land surface–atmospheric interactions in these regions. Our analysis also highlights the importance of correctly projecting the magnitude of changes in the summer North Atlantic Oscillation, which has the capacity to partly offset anthropogenic warming and drying over the western and central Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the projections suggest a decreasing influence of local atmospheric dynamics and teleconnections in maintaining the regional temperature and precipitation balance, in particular over arid regions like the eastern and southern Mediterranean, which show a local maximum of warming and drying. The intensification of the heat low in these regions rather suggests an increasing influence of warming land surface on the local surface atmospheric circulation and progressing desertification.
Highlights
The climate in the Mediterranean region is primarily characterized by mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers
The analysis aims to interpret the derived future climate changes through the prism of the contributing summer expression of the NAO (SNAO) teleconnection, as well as the impact of local surface warming and the associated land surface–air interactions
Allowing for the fact that (a) circulation over the SNAO region is influenced by different key factors at different times, giving rise to time-varying dominant modes of apparent internal variability, and (b) each simulation represents a different, nondeterministic state of internal climate variations, one should not expect to obtain from each run a replica of the observed SNAO component
Summary
The climate in the Mediterranean region is primarily characterized by mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers. It evaluates the performance of the model in terms of the simulated regional precipitation and large-scale circulation features, which shape the summer regime of the Mediterranean climate. It examines the regional changes from the perspective of (a) large-scale circulation over the Euro-Atlantic and the influence of the SNAO teleconnection, as well as (b) local land surface warming and its influence on the climate regime of the eastern Mediterranean.
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