Abstract
Abstract. In this study, a new regional Earth system model is developed and applied to the Med-CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) region. The ENEA-REG system is made up of two interchangeable regional climate models as atmospheric components (RegCM, REGional Climate Model, and WRF, Weather Research and Forecasting), a river model (Hydrological Discharge, HD), and an ocean model (Massachusetts Institute of Technology General Circulation Model, MITgcm); processes taking place at the land surface are represented within the atmospheric models with the possibility to use several land surface schemes of different complexity. The coupling between these components is performed through the RegESM driver. Here, we present and describe our regional Earth system model and evaluate its components using a multidecadal hindcast simulation over the period 1980–2013 driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis. We show that the atmospheric components correctly reproduce both large-scale and local features of the Euro-Mediterranean climate, although we found some remarkable biases: in particular, WRF has a significant cold bias during winter over the northeastern bound of the domain and a warm bias in the whole continental Europe during summer, while RegCM overestimates the wind speed over the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the ocean component correctly reproduces the analyzed ocean properties with performances comparable to the state-of-art coupled regional models contributing to the Med-CORDEX initiative. Our regional Earth system model allows studying the Euro-Mediterranean climate system and can be applied to both hindcast and scenario simulations.
Highlights
The Mediterranean Basin is a complex region characterized by pronounced topography and a complex land–sea distribution, including many islands and several straits
Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) shows a remarkable cold bias during DJF over northeastern Europe, with magnitudes larger than 4 ◦C. Such a cold bias over this region has already been described in several studies, and it mainly depends on the poor representation of the snow–atmosphere interaction, amplified by the albedo feedback (e.g., Mooney et al, 2013; Kotlarski et al, 2014; García-Díez et al, 2015; Katragkou et al, 2015)
Despite the fact that, when setting up WRF, we were aware of both the need to carefully select parameterization combinations and the issues associated with some of the selected parameterizations, we chose the present settings as they reproduce wind fields over the Mediterranean region well, which is relevant when running WRF coupled with an ocean model
Summary
The Mediterranean Basin is a complex region characterized by pronounced topography and a complex land–sea distribution, including many islands and several straits. Given the relatively fine spatial scales at which these processes occur, the Mediterranean Basin provides an excellent opportunity to study the regional climate, with a particular focus on the air–sea coupling (Sevault et al, 2014; Turuncoglu and Sannino, 2017) For these reasons, regional coupled models have been developed and used to study both present and future Mediterranean climate systems (e.g., Dubois et al, 2012; Ruti et al, 2016; Darmaraki et al, 2019; Parras-Berrocal et al, 2020); these models, depending on their complexity, include several physical components of the climate system, like atmosphere, ocean, land surface, rivers and biogeochemistry (both for land and ocean)
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