Abstract
AbstractThis work evaluates the daily precipitation and mean temperature of eight CORDEX‐EUR11 ERA‐Interim‐driven simulations of EURO‐CORDEX over the Iberian Peninsula (IP) for the period 1989–2008. To this aim, three observational data sets (Iberia01, E‐OBS‐v19e, and MESAN‐0.11) were considered as reference and compared with the models by means of several indices reflecting the mean and extreme regimes over the IP. For precipitation the Lamb weather types were considered to identify synoptic conditions related with higher observational uncertainty. RCMs are able to reproduce the spatial pattern and the variability observed in the IP. However, there is a higher agreement between models and observations for mean temperature than for precipitation, decreasing when extremes are analyzed. For the observational uncertainty analysis, also extreme daily temperatures were considered to obtain a wider picture of this topic. A higher dependence on the observational data set has been found for precipitation than for temperature. This uncertainty is particularly significant when the 50‐year return value is considered for which the observational uncertainty doubles the model uncertainty. Only the wet‐day frequency presents values lower than 0.5 for all seasons, with most of the rest of values reflecting a similar contribution of both components to the uncertainty. In the case of temperatures, the main contribution of the observations has been found when the lower (MAE01) and upper (MAE99) extremes are considered, with values lower than 0.5. For precipitation the observational uncertainty increases when synoptic patterns affecting the Mediterranean Basin are considered, reflecting the difficulty to properly capture the Mediterranean precipitation regimes.
Highlights
The Iberian Peninsula (IP), located in the southwest of Europe, between the midlatitude North Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea, is characterized by a climate with large interannual and spatial variability (Cardoso et al, 2013; Esteban-Parra et al, 1998; Muñoz-Díaz & Rodrigo, 2004), significantly enhanced by coastal and/or land-ocean-atmosphere interaction processes, and complex topography (Knist et al, 2017; Rios-Entenza et al, 2014)
Regarding the regional climate models (RCMs), almost all the differences are greater than 60%, being the STD parameter the one reaching the largest differences for all the RCMs and variables (Temp.: 73.51–98.66; Precip.: 89.67–93.96)
As a difference with the observational references, there is a great heterogeneity between the RCMs in the case of the 50-year return value of temperature with differences ranging between 24.84% and 84.13% while in the case of precipitation the behavior is more homogeneous with all the values greater than 85.85%
Summary
The Iberian Peninsula (IP), located in the southwest of Europe, between the midlatitude North Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea, is characterized by a climate with large interannual and spatial variability (Cardoso et al, 2013; Esteban-Parra et al, 1998; Muñoz-Díaz & Rodrigo, 2004), significantly enhanced by coastal and/or land-ocean-atmosphere interaction processes, and complex topography (Knist et al, 2017; Rios-Entenza et al, 2014). The typical resolution of a GCM is still around 100 km, and, despite the notable ability of GCMs in representing the main properties of the large-scale atmospheric circulations (Meehl et al, 2007), they are unable to capture some of the physical processes (e.g., convection and clouds) that have a key role in defining the regional mean climate and extremes, especially at the subgrid scale (Frei et al, 2003; Randall et al, 2007; Soares, Cardoso, Miranda, de Medeiros, et al, 2012; Soares, Cardoso, Miranda, Viterbo, & Belo-Pereira, 2012) Downscaling techniques, both dynamical (Fernández et al, 2018) and statistical (Gutirrez et al, 2018), are used to fill this gap between the output of global models and the regional and local scales.
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