Abstract
South-East France is a region often affected by heavy precipitating events the characteristics of which are likely to be significantly impacted in the future climate. In this study, cnrm-arome, a Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Model with a 2.5 km horizontal resolution is compared to its forcing model, the Regional Climate Model aladin-climate at a horizontal resolution of 12.5 km, self-driven by the era-interim reanalysis. An hourly observation dataset with a resolution of 1 km, comephore, is used in order to assess simulated surface precipitation from a seasonal to hourly scale. The representation of the spatial pattern of fall precipitation climatology is improved by cnrm-arome. It also shows a clear added value with respect to aladin-climate through the improvement of the localization and intensity of extreme rainfall on a daily and hourly time scale on both fine and coarse spatial scales (2.5, 12.5 and 50 km). cnrm-arome in particular is able to simulate intense rainfall on lowlands and makes sub-daily rainfall events more intense than aladin-climate. cnrm-arome still underestimates very extreme precipitation from above 30 mm/h or 230 mm/day.
Highlights
The Mediterranean region is emerging as one of the primary hot-spots in future climate change projections (Giorgi 2006)
During Mediterranean hpes, a substantial accumulation of surface precipitation can occur in a few hours and over very localized areas. comephore has an effective hourly temporal resolution allowing a better spatio-temporal representation of hpes compared to safran from which hourly precipitation come from daily rainfall with a separation based on a climatological profile
We have shown that the hourly and daily precipitation of the arome model is closer to the observations than the precipitation simulated by aladin-climate
Summary
The Mediterranean region is emerging as one of the primary hot-spots in future climate change projections (Giorgi 2006). The multi-model study of Coppola et al (2019) proves the ability of high-resolution models to reproduce three cases of heavy rainfall in Europe in climate mode (a summer time extreme precipitation event over Austria, a fall Foehn event over the Swiss Alps and an intensively documented fall event along the Mediterranean coast) This proves motivational to the current study which proposes the testing of a model with explicit convection on a multi-annual scale in order to assess its statistical representation of hpes. To the authors’ knowledge the added value of cprcm to better represent the specific Mediterranean hpes has not yet been studied statistically in particular in the fall and on an hourly time scale This is the major goal of this study in which a parameterized convection rcm at 12.5 km (aladin-climate) is compared with a cprcm at a resolution of 2.5 km (cnrm-arome38t1, referred to as arome in the following) in 10-year long simulations, so as to assess the statistical robustness of the results.
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