Projections of twenty-ﬁrst century climate over Europe

F. Giorgi,E. Coppola

doi:10.1140/epjconf/e2009-00908-9

Abstract

We present an assessment of climate change pro jections over the European region for the 21 st century from the ensembles of CMIP3 global model experiments and PRUDENCE regional climate model experiments. The A2, A1B, and B1 IPCC emission scenarios are considered. A brief review is also presented of the literature available on future European climate pro jections. In all emission scenarios the European region shows maximum warming of up to several degrees C over the Mediterranean region in summer and over northeastern Europe in winter. The precipitation change signal shows a north-south dipolar structure, with increasing precipitation over Northern Europe and decreasing over southern Europe. This structure migrates northward from the winter to the summer and is tied to the north-south motion of an increasing anticyclonic circulation cell over the North Atlantic-European sector. Temperature interannual variability decreases in winter over central and northern Europe and increases in summer throughout Europe. Precipitation interannual variability shows a predominant increase, most pronounced in summer. The seasonal temperature anomaly probability density functions (PDFs) show a shift and a widening and ﬂattening in future climate conditions, especially in summer, which is indicative of pronounced increases of extreme hot seasons. The seasonal precipitation anomaly PDFs show pronounced changes over Southern Europe in summer, with a strong increase of very dry seasons. In general, the magnitude of future climate change increases with the greenhouse gas forcing. A broad consensus is found between the pro jections obtained with the CMIP3 and PRUDENCE ensembles, as well as between the present analysis and previous generations of model pro jections. The climate change signal over Europe exhibits a consistent latitudinal and seasonal evolution identiﬁed as the European Climate change Oscillation (ECO) by Giorgi and Coppola [F. Giorgi and E. Coppola, Geophys. Res. Lett. 34, L21703 (2007)]. The changes of temperature and precipitation over Europe are pronounced, making this region highly vulnerable to global warming.

Highlights

The European region has been identified as being sensitive to projected 21st century global warming [2]
The most advanced ensemble of Atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) simulations that can be used for climate change assessment studies is the CMIP3 [24] and this will provide the basis for the analysis presented in this paper
Our main conclusions based on the analysis of climate change scenarios over the European region from the recently completed ensembles of global (CMIP3) and regional (PRUDENCE) climate change simulations for different Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emission scenarios can be summarized as follows: 1. There is a general consistency between the projections obtained with the CMIP3 and PRUDENCE ensembles, even though they were completed with different modeling systems and showed different systematic biases over the region

Summary

Introduction

The European region has been identified as being sensitive to projected 21st century global warming [2]. Driven at the lateral boundaries by AOGCM fields, RCMs can be run at resolutions of a few tens of km and can regionally enhance the AOGCM information and provide fine scale climate change data [7]. This is important for the European region, which is characterized by complex topography, coastlines and land-use distribution and spans a wide range of climate types, from semi-arid in the southern Mediterranean regions to cold-wet in Northern Europe

Methods

Results

Conclusion