Comprehensive dataset assessing extreme winds over Europe in Regional Climate Models

Abstract

Extreme events cause vast amounts of damage across Europe every year, with heavy rainfall events often causing the greatest loss of life and extreme wind events often causing the greatest financial losses. The accurate projection of the changes in extreme winds will continues to be invaluable for many industries, including insurance, construction, energy, and afforestation. Adaptation planning requires the estimation of how the magnitude and frequency of extreme events, including extreme winds, will vary in the future.Extreme winds were examined in a selection of 15 Euro-CORDEX simulations. The peaks-over-threshold approach was used identify the extreme events based on the fitted Generalized Pareto Distributions (GPD), and maps of 30-year return winds for all locations over Europe were derived. Future changes in the frequency of extreme winds were assessed for Northern, Central, and Sothern Europe for three future periods, being the near, mid, and end of this century. The results show that the frequency of extreme wind events will increase from one period to the next over the 21st century in all three regions of Europe.Recently, a new dataset has been created by extending the analysis to 52 of the Euro-CORDEX simulations, each a unique combination of global and regional model, using both the peaks-over-threshold and annual maxima methods. Since these simulations include multiple downscalings of the same global climate models by different regional climate models, it is possible to intercompare how the different model combinations represent extreme winds. This allowed us to isolate the influence of individual global and regional models in shaping the extreme winds in Euro-CORDEX simulations. From this, we have been able to statistically create maps of extreme winds across Europe for GCM-RCM combinations that were never run. These results will be presented, along with details of the new dataset, and a summary of the original 15-member study.