Abstract
Abstract. We analyse the variability of the probability distribution of daily wind speed in wintertime over Northern and Central Europe in a series of global and regional climate simulations covering the last centuries, and in reanalysis products covering approximately the last 60 years. The focus of the study lies on identifying the link of the variations in the wind speed distribution to the regional near-surface temperature, to the meridional temperature gradient and to the North Atlantic Oscillation. Our main result is that the link between the daily wind distribution and the regional climate drivers is strongly model dependent. The global models tend to behave similarly, although they show some discrepancies. The two regional models also tend to behave similarly to each other, but surprisingly the results derived from each regional model strongly deviates from the results derived from its driving global model. In addition, considering multi-centennial timescales, we find in two global simulations a long-term tendency for the probability distribution of daily wind speed to widen through the last centuries. The cause for this widening is likely the effect of the deforestation prescribed in these simulations. We conclude that no clear systematic relationship between the mean temperature, the temperature gradient and/or the North Atlantic Oscillation, with the daily wind speed statistics can be inferred from these simulations. The understanding of past and future changes in the distribution of wind speeds, and thus of wind speed extremes, will require a detailed analysis of the representation of the interaction between large-scale and small-scale dynamics.
Highlights
Anthropogenic climate change is expected to cause an increase of various types of extreme events, such as heatwaves, but its effects on extreme winds is less clear
A common characteristic shared by all analysed simulations is the negative correlation between the mean winter temperature and the mean meridional temperature gradient
This study investigates and compares different simulation data sets and reanalysis products, on timescales covering the last decades to the past millennium, regarding the probability distribution of the daily wind speed in winter time over Northern Europe
Summary
Anthropogenic climate change is expected to cause an increase of various types of extreme events, such as heatwaves, but its effects on extreme winds is less clear. While there is still a dearth of proxy records reflecting past changes in wind speed, new types of proxy records are being developed (Costas, 2013). A precondition for this comparison is to test whether different climate models provide a consistent picture of past changes in wind speed distribution. In this study we analyse several simulations with global and regional models and investigate to what extent they provide a consistent picture of the relationship between the variations in the wind speed distribution and large-scale drivers. We focus on Northern Europe in wintertime as this region and season are prone to storminess
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