Abstract
A new high-resolution regional climate change ensemble has been established for Europe within the World Climate Research Program Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) initiative. The first set of simulations with a horizontal resolution of 12.5 km was completed for the new emission scenarios RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 with more simulations expected to follow. The aim of this paper is to present this data set to the different communities active in regional climate modelling, impact assessment and adaptation. The EURO-CORDEX ensemble results have been compared to the SRES A1B simulation results achieved within the ENSEMBLES project. The large-scale patterns of changes in mean temperature and precipitation are similar in all three scenarios, but they differ in regional details, which can partly be related to the higher resolution in EURO-CORDEX. The results strengthen those obtained in ENSEMBLES, but need further investigations. The analysis of impact indices shows that for RCP8.5, there is a substantially larger change projected for temperature-based indices than for RCP4.5. The difference is less pronounced for precipitation-based indices. Two effects of the increased resolution can be regarded as an added value of regional climate simulations. Regional climate model simulations provide higher daily precipitation intensities, which are completely missing in the global climate model simulations, and they provide a significantly different climate change of daily precipitation intensities resulting in a smoother shift from weak to moderate and high intensities.
Highlights
Climate impact assessments and the development of regional to local-scale adaptation strategies require the availability of high-resolution climate change scenarios, including an assessment of their robustness and their inherent uncertainties
A new high-resolution regional climate change ensemble has been established for Europe within the World Climate Research Program Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) initiative
The regional climate change projections provided by the EU-FP6 ENSEMBLES multi-model ensemble for the Special Report on Emission Scenario (SRES) A1B scenario are considered as state-of-the-art for European climate impact research
Summary
Climate impact assessments and the development of regional to local-scale adaptation strategies require the availability of high-resolution climate change scenarios, including an assessment of their robustness and their inherent uncertainties. Ipsl.jussieu.fr/; Giorgi et al 2006) provides an internationally coordinated framework to improve regional climate scenarios. This includes harmonisation of model evaluation activities in the individual modelling centres and the generation of multi-model ensembles of regional climate projections for the land-regions worldwide. As part of the global CORDEX framework, the EUROCORDEX initiative (http://www.euro-cordex.net/) provides regional climate projections for Europe at 50 km (EUR-44) and 12.5 km (EUR-11) resolution, thereby complementing coarser resolution data sets of former activities like, e.g., PRUDENCE and ENSEMBLES. Twenty-six modelling groups contributing 11 different regional climate models, partly in different model configurations, actively support EURO-CORDEX
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