Abstract

Abstract. Using the regional climate model ALARO-0, the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium and Ghent University have performed two simulations of the past observed climate within the framework of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). The ERA-Interim reanalysis was used to drive the model for the period 1979–2010 on the EURO-CORDEX domain with two horizontal resolutions, 0.11 and 0.44°. ALARO-0 is characterised by the new microphysics scheme 3MT, which allows for a better representation of convective precipitation. In Kotlarski et al. (2014) several metrics assessing the performance in representing seasonal mean near-surface air temperature and precipitation are defined and the corresponding scores are calculated for an ensemble of models for different regions and seasons for the period 1989–2008. Of special interest within this ensemble is the ARPEGE model by the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM), which shares a large amount of core code with ALARO-0. Results show that ALARO-0 is capable of representing the European climate in an acceptable way as most of the ALARO-0 scores lie within the existing ensemble. However, for near-surface air temperature, some large biases, which are often also found in the ARPEGE results, persist. For precipitation, on the other hand, the ALARO-0 model produces some of the best scores within the ensemble and no clear resemblance to ARPEGE is found, which is attributed to the inclusion of 3MT. Additionally, a jackknife procedure is applied to the ALARO-0 results in order to test whether the scores are robust, meaning independent of the period used to calculate them. Periods of 20 years are sampled from the 32-year simulation and used to construct the 95 % confidence interval for each score. For most scores, these intervals are very small compared to the total ensemble spread, implying that model differences in the scores are significant.

Highlights

  • The climate projections used in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) are based on the set of global climate model (GCM) simulations performed within the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5; Taylor et al, 2011)

  • Results show that ALARO-0 is capable of representing the European climate in an acceptable way as most of the ALARO-0 scores lie within the existing ensemble

  • On the other hand, the ALARO-0 model produces some of the best scores within the ensemble and no clear resemblance to ARPEGE is found, which is attributed to the inclusion of 3MT

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Summary

Introduction

The climate projections used in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) are based on the set of global climate model (GCM) simulations performed within the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5; Taylor et al, 2011). The horizontal resolution of the contributing GCMs is limited to typically 1–2◦ by computational constraints. For many local climate impact studies, regional climate models (RCMs; Giorgi and Mearns, 1999) are needed to reveal the fine-scale details of potential climate change (Teutschbein and Seibert, 2010). Specific downstream models which simulate processes such as vegetation interactions, urban effects Hamdi et al, 2015) or extreme hydrological events in river catchments often require high-resolution (both in time and space) forcing data from atmospheric models. Giot et al.: Validation of the ALARO-0 model within the EURO-CORDEX framework

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