Verification of the EURO-CORDEX RCM Historical Run Results over the Pannonian Basin for the Summer Season

Irida Lazić,Vladimir Djurdjević,Milica Tošić

doi:10.3390/atmos12060714

Irida Lazić, Vladimir Djurdjević + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12060714

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Journal: Atmosphere	Publication Date: May 31, 2021
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Belgrade

Abstract

In previous projects that focused on dynamical downscaling over Europe, e.g., PRUDENCE and ENSEMBLES, many regional climate models (RCMs) tended to overestimate summer air temperature and underestimate precipitation in this season in Southern and Southeastern Europe, leading to the so-called summer drying problem. This bias pattern occurred not only in the RCM results but also in the global climate model (GCM) results, so knowledge of the model uncertainties and their cascade is crucial for understanding and interpreting future climate. Our intention with this study was to examine whether a warm-and-dry bias is also present in the state-of-the-art EURO-CORDEX multi-model ensemble results in the summer season over the Pannonian Basin. Verification of EURO-CORDEX RCMs was carried out by using the E-OBS gridded dataset of daily mean, minimum, and maximum near-surface air temperature and total precipitation amount with a horizontal resolution of 0.1 degrees (approximately 12 km × 12 km) over the 1971–2000 time period. The model skill for selected period was expressed in terms of four verification scores: bias, centered root mean square error (RMSE), spatial correlation coefficient, and standard deviation. The main findings led us to conclude that most of the RCMs that overestimate temperature also underestimate precipitation. For some models, the positive temperature and negative precipitation bias were more emphasized, which led us to conclude that the problem was still present in most of the analyzed simulations.

Highlights

To carry out more realistic regional climate simulations, climate models demand the representation of processes from global and large scales to regional and local scales
Previous studies have shown that in the Carpathian region, high-resolution regional climate models (RCMs) simulations (0.11◦) were better than medium resolution (0.44◦) in model evaluation compared with observation data, especially in the sense of representing the precipitation field during summer when the majority of convective processes occurs within the study area [37]
RCMs are valuable sources of fine-scale climate information because they are often used as input to assess the impact of possible climate change in the future on certain socioeconomic sectors of society or the environment

Summary

Introduction

To carry out more realistic regional climate simulations, climate models demand the representation of processes from global and large scales to regional and local scales. Climate-change impacts on communities require tools, such as regional climate models (RCMs), to complement the results of global climate models (GCMs) [1]. Dynamic downscaling represents a method of using the RCM at a finer resolution to improve the results of coarse-scale GCMs. RCMs are driven by GCM lateral boundary conditions (LBCs), and they modulate the driver’s results at local scales due to the higher spatial resolution and the more complex physics described in the models [3,4,5]. RCMs add regional detail as a response to regional-scale forcing, such as topography, with more explicitly described physics in the model as a result of increasing spatial resolution (e.g., References [4,7])

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