Abstract
AbstractCyclones with tropical characteristics called medicanes (“Mediterranean Hurricanes”) eventually develop in the Mediterranean Sea. They have large harmful potential and a correct simulation of their evolution in climate projections is important for an adequate adaptation to climate change. Different studies suggest that ocean–atmosphere coupled models provide a better representation of medicanes, especially in terms of intensity and frequency. In this work, we use the regionally‐coupled model ROM to study how air‐sea interactions affect the evolution of medicanes in future climate projections. We find that under the RCP8.5 scenario our climate simulations show an overall frequency decrease which is more pronounced in the coupled than in the uncoupled configuration, whereas the intensity displays a different behaviour depending on the coupling. In the coupled run, the relative frequency of higher‐intensity medicanes increases, but this is not found in the uncoupled simulation. Also, this study indicates that the coupled model simulates better the summer minimum in the occurrence of medicanes, avoiding the reproduction of unrealistically intense events that can be found in summer in the uncoupled model.
Highlights
The Mediterranean basin is one of the main cyclogenetic regions in the world (Alpert and Neeman, 2016)
This paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we present the configurations of ROM and REMO used in this study and the methodology used to detect medicanes
We have examined the influence of air-sea coupling on future projections of medicanes
Summary
The Mediterranean basin is one of the main cyclogenetic regions in the world (Alpert and Neeman, 2016). This, together with the necessary parameterisations of subgridscale processes does not allow GCMs to capture some key physical phenomena and hampers the accuracy of climate projections on regional and local scales This is especially true in the Mediterranean region, where high resolution is necessary for both the oceanic and atmospheric components (Xie et al, 2015). The climatological analysis by Gaertner et al (2018) of the role of air-sea coupling and horizontal resolution is limited to present-day medicanes, like in the study of Akhtar et al (2014), in which a highresolution atmospheric model is coupled to a simplified one-dimensional ocean model. The main novelty of the present work is the analysis of future projections of medicanes under anthropogenic climate change, using a fully-coupled regional climate model with high horizontal resolution in both the atmosphere (25 km grid spacing) and the ocean (between 5 and 10 km grid spacing).
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