Abstract
We describe the process of building a climate service centred on regional climate model results from the Rossby Centre regional climate model RCA4. The climate service has as its central facility a web service provided by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute where users can get an idea of various aspects of climate change from a suite of maps, diagrams, explaining texts and user guides. Here we present the contents of the web service and how this has been designed and developed in collaboration with users of the service in a dialogue reaching over more than a decade. We also present the ensemble of climate projections with RCA4 that provides the fundamental climate information presented at the web service. In this context, RCA4 has been used to downscale nine different coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) from the 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) to 0.44° (c. 50 km) horizontal resolution over Europe. Further, we investigate how this ensemble relates to the CMIP5 ensemble.We find that the iterative approach involving the users of the climate service has been successful as the service is widely used and is an important source of information for work on climate adaptation in Sweden. The RCA4 ensemble samples a large degree of the spread in the CMIP5 ensemble implying that it can be used to illustrate uncertainties and robustness in future climate change in Sweden. The results also show that RCA4 changes results compared to the underlying AOGCMs, sometimes in a systematic way.
Highlights
As a designated national expert agency for weather, climate, hydrology, and oceanography in Sweden, SMHI has a long experience of communicating with a wide range of users
The results show that RCA4 changes results compared to the underlying atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs), sometimes in a systematic way
To meet the increasing need for production and publication of regional climate scenarios outlined by CORDEX the Rossby Centre developed a more streamlined technical production process permitting multiple ensembles of scenarios to be produced and presented
Summary
As a designated national expert agency for weather, climate, hydrology, and oceanography in Sweden, SMHI has a long experience of communicating with a wide range of users. With the raising awareness of climate change and its impacts a need has emerged for ‘‘actionable” information on climate and climate change (Asrar et al, 2013) To meet these new challenges SMHI activities pertaining to climate and climate change communication has over the last decades evolved to inform society about weather and climate, and discuss the information after it has been presented, but to more actively involve the users of that information already in the early stages of production and design of the presentation material. To meet the increasing need for production and publication of regional climate scenarios outlined by CORDEX the Rossby Centre developed a more streamlined technical production process permitting multiple ensembles of scenarios to be produced and presented
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