Suchergebnisse

Abstract. We describe a method to represent the results of climate simulation models with spatial analogues. An analogue to a city A is a city B whose climate today corresponds to A's simulated future climate. Climates were characterized and compared non-parametrically, using the 30-years distribution of three indicators: Aridity Index, Heating Degree Days and Cooling Degree Days. The level of correspondence (i.e. strength of analogy) was evaluated statistically with the two-samples Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, generalized to 3 dimensions. We looked at the climate of 12 European cities at the end of the 21st century under an A2 climate change scenario. We used two datasets produced with high-resolution regional climate simulation models from the Hadley Centre and Meteo France. As expected from the modelled warming in local climate, analogues were found in warmer regions, mostly at more southerly latitudes within Europe, although much model and scenario uncertainty remains. Climate analogues provide an intuitive way to show the possible effects of climate change on urban areas, offering a holistic approach to think about how cities might adapt to different climates. Evidence of its communication value comes from the reuse of our maps in teaching and in several European mass-media.

Abstract. This paper proposes a methodology to project the possible evolution of river flood damages due to climate change, and applies it to mainland France. Its main contributions are (i) to demonstrate a methodology to investigate the full causal chain from global climate change to local economic flood losses; (ii) to show that future flood losses may change in a very significant manner over France; (iii) to show that a very large uncertainty arises from the climate downscaling technique, since two techniques with comparable skills at reproducing reference river flows give very different estimates of future flows, and thus of future local losses. The main conclusion is thus that estimating future flood losses is still out of reach, especially at local scale, but that future national-scale losses may change significantly over this century, requiring policy changes in terms of risk management and land-use planning.