Abstract
In this study, projected changes in climate extreme indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices were investigated over Middle East and North Africa. Changes in the daily maximum and minimum temperature- and precipitation- based extreme indices were analyzed for the end of the 21st century compared to the reference period 1971–2000 using regional climate model simulations. Regional climate model, RegCM4.4 was used to downscale two different global climate model outputs to 50 km resolution under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Results generally indicate an intensification of temperature- and precipitation- based extreme indices with increasing radiative forcing. In particular, an increase in annual minimum of daily minimum temperatures is more pronounced over the northern part of Mediterranean Basin and tropics. High increase in warm nights and warm spell duration all over the region with a pronounced increase in tropics are projected for the period of 2071–2100 together with decrease or no change in cold extremes. According to the results, a decrease in total wet-day precipitation and increase in dry spells are expected for the end of the century.
Highlights
The need for robust future projections of extreme climate events has increased rapidly during the recent decades since extreme climate events affect society and ecosystems with their potentially severe impacts [1,2,3]
As a complementary study to the work of Sillmann et al [2], the aim of this study is to investigate the projected changes in climate extreme indices defined by ETCCDI
We investigated future changes in extreme climate indices defined by ETCCDI using regional climate model simulations driven by two global climate models for CORDEX-Middle East North Africa (MENA) region under two different radiative forcing pathways RCP4.5 and
Summary
The need for robust future projections of extreme climate events has increased rapidly during the recent decades since extreme climate events affect society and ecosystems with their potentially severe impacts [1,2,3]. As with many climate phenomena, extreme events are multifaceted and are extremely difficult to monitor [5]. There have been international coordinated efforts to enable and ease the research on observed and projected changes to encourage the comparison of observations and modeled data of climate extreme events, especially for temperature and precipitation extremes. One such effort was by the Expert Team on Climate Change
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