Abstract
The regional manifestation of climate change projections for Europe consistently indicates a future decrease in summer precipitation over southern Europe and an increase over northern Europe. However, individual models substantially modulate these overarching precipitation change signals. Despite considerable model improvements as well as increasingly higher model resolutions in regional downscaling efforts, these apparent inconsistencies so far seem unresolved. In the present study, we analyze European seasonal temperature and precipitation climate change projections using all readily available pan-European regional climate model projections for the twenty-first century with model increasing from ∼50 km to ∼12 km grid distances from the CORDEX modelling project. This allows for an in-depth understanding of what may be the most robust projection of the future climate. Employing a simple scaling with the global mean temperature change enables the identification of emerging robust signals of changes in seasonal temperature and precipitation. Likewise, the what-if approach, i.e., analysing the climate change signal from transient experiments at the time of an emerging global temperature exceedance of e.g. 1, 2 or 3 degrees offers a policy relevant approach to provide more accurate projections. Comparing the projections from these two approaches has never been done in a comprehensive manner and is the subject of the present paper.
Highlights
In the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5◦C (IPCC, 2018), a global warming of 1.5◦C above pre-industrial levels is used as a target to understand how this warming will impact society and how drastic climate change mitigation actions are needed
The Pattern Scaling Approach The pattern scaling is defined as the climate change of a 20year mean of the temperature and precipitation fields scaled by the global mean temperature change of the relevant GCM
The area over the Atlantic Ocean is affected by signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) < 1 due to a moderate climate change signal
Summary
In the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5◦C (IPCC, 2018), a global warming of 1.5◦C above pre-industrial levels is used as a target to understand how this warming will impact society and how drastic climate change mitigation actions are needed. At the current rate of change, this target is expected to be reached somewhere between 2030 and 2052. The geographical patterns of the ongoing change are indicators of what the near future may bring and how the longer-time average changes may manifest themselves. If no changes are made to moderate a business-as-usual societal development, it is very likely that a higher warming level will be reached increasing the risks for negative societal impacts. A “what-if ” approach is used, analyzing climate simulations around the point in time where a target is crossed. Vautard et al (2014) used an ensemble of 30-year time slices around the point in time where the projected average global temperatures
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
