Abstract
<strong class="journal-contentHeaderColor">Abstract.</strong> Due to climate change, years with positive temperature anomalies are becoming more frequent in Europe, requiring<br />high-resolution climate data to plan for climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, many regional climate models<br />(RCMs) simplify the representation of groundwater processes, leading to biases in simulated extreme heat events. Here, we<br />study the characteristics of summer heat events in a unique dataset from the regional Terrestrial Systems Modeling Platform<br />(TSMP) simulations, compared to an ensemble of EURO-CORDEX climate change scenario control simulations, for the historical<br />time period 1976–2005. Our results show that in TSMP, the impact of groundwater coupling on the frequency of hot summer days depends on the<br />considered time period and the region, associated with respective evaporative regime. An increasing trend of the frequency<br />of hot summer days averaged across Europe is the lowest in TSMP compared to the other RCMs considered. Groundwater<br />coupling has a systematic effect on the duration and intensity of heat events: summer heat events with long duration and high<br />intensity are less frequent in TSMP compared to the CORDEX ensemble. In particular, extended heat events with a duration<br />exceeding 6 days, i.e. heat waves, occur on average in Europe about 1.5–8 times less often in TSMP, while single-day heat<br />events happen slightly more often in TSMP compared to the CORDEX ensemble. The frequency of high-intensity heat waves<br />in TSMP is up to 12 times lower on average in Europe compared to the CORDEX ensemble. Thus, an explicit groundwater<br />representation in RCMs may lead to rarer and weaker heat waves in Europe also in climate projections. The findings of this<br />work indicate an existing discrepancy in the ensemble of EURO-CORDEX climate change scenario control simulations and<br />emphasize the importance of groundwater representation in RCMs.
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