ABSTRACT: This work evaluates the daily precipitation and mean temperature of eight CORDEX-EUR11 ERA-Interim-driven simulations of EURO-CORDEX over the Iberian Peninsula (IP) for the period 1989-2008. To this aim, three observational data sets (Iberia01, E-OBS-v19e, and MESAN-0.11) were considered as reference and compared with the models by means of several indices reflecting the mean and extreme regimes over the IP. For precipitation the Lamb weather types were considered to identify synoptic conditions related with higher observational uncertainty. RCMs are able to reproduce the spatial pattern and the variability observed in the IP. However, there is a higher agreement between models and observations for mean temperature than for precipitation, decreasing when extremes are analyzed. For the observational uncertainty analysis, also extreme daily temperatures were considered to obtain a wider picture of this topic. A higher dependence on the observational data set has been found for precipitation than for temperature. This uncertainty is particularly significant when the 50-year return value is considered for which the observational uncertainty doubles the model uncertainty. Only the wet-day frequency presents values lower than 0.5 for all seasons, with most of the rest of values reflecting a similar contribution of both components to the uncertainty. In the case of temperatures, the main contribution of the observations has been found when the lower (MAE01) and upper (MAE99) extremes are considered, with values lower than 0.5. For precipitation the observational uncertainty increases when synoptic patterns affecting the Mediterranean Basin are considered, reflecting the difficulty to properly capture the Mediterranean precipitation regimes. ; This work was partially funded by the Spanish Government R&D Programme (Exp. CGL2010-21869 and CGL2010-22158-C02) and the European Comission (INDECIS: H2020-690462). Pedro M. M. Soares and Rita M. Cardoso wish to acknowledge the SOLAR (PTDC/GEOMET/7078/2014) Project and the funding by the Instituto Dom Luiz (Project FCT UID/GEO/50019/2019).
Ponencia presentada en: XXXV Jornadas Científicas de la AME y el XIX Encuentro Hispano Luso de Meteorología celebrado en León, del 5 al 7 de marzo de 2018. ; Most heavy precipitation events occurring in the world are associated with convective processes. As these phenomena produce severe economic and societal impacts, it is crucial to get to know their behaviour and their evolution in a future climate. For this reason, the international project CORDEX (Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling Experiment) proposed the Flagship Pilot Study on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean, focused on the study of convection in Europe. In this initiative, multi-model and multi-physics results and uncertainties of regional climate models (RCMs) are explored by means of ensembles of simulations. In this work, we additionally explore the role of internal variability to explain the differences found in the results by different model configurations. ; This work is funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R).
This work is funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R). UCAN simulations have been carried out on the Altamira Supercomputer at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA, CSIC-UC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network.
In a recent study, Coppola et al. assessed the ability of an ensemble of convection-permitting models (CPM) to simulate deep convection using three case studies. The ensemble exhibited strong discrepancies between models, which were attributed to various factors. In order to shed some light on the issue, we quantify in this article the uncertainty associated to different physical parameterizations from that of using different initial conditions, often referred to as the internal variability. For this purpose, we establish a framework to quantify both signals and we compare them for upper atmospheric circulation and near-surface variables. The analysis is carried out in the context of the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean, in which the intermediate RCM WRF simulations that serve to drive the CPM are run several times with different parameterizations. For atmospheric circulation (geopotential height), the sensitivity induced by multi?physics and the internal variability show comparable magnitudes and a similar spatial distribution pattern. For 2-m temperature and 10-m wind, the simulations with different parameterizations show larger differences than those launched with different initial conditions. The systematic effect over one year shows distinct patterns for the multi-physics and the internal variability. Therefore, the general lesson of this study is that internal variability should be analysed in order to properly distinguish the impact of other sources of uncertainty, especially for short-term sensitivity simulations. ; This work is partially funded by the Spanish government through grant BES-2016-078158 and MINECO/ FEDER co-funded projects INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R) and MULTI-SDM (CGL2015-66583-R). Universidad de Cantabria simulations have been carried out on the Altamira Supercomputer at the Instituto de F´ısica de Cantabria (IFCA-CSIC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network. EK and SK acknowledge the support of the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET) High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure for providing the computational resources of AUTH-simulations (under project ID pr003005) and the AUTH Scientific Computing Center for technical support. IPSL acknowledges the support from the EUCP project, funded by the European Union under H2020 Grant Agreement 776613, and from the IPSL mesocenter ESPRI facility which is supported by CNRS, UPMC, Labex L-IPSL, CNES and Ecole Polytechnique. IPSL simulations were granted access to the HPC resources of TGCC 19 under the allocation A0050106877 made by GENCI. The computational resources for NORCE/BCCR were provided by UNINETT Sigma2 (NN9280K, NS9001K), with funding from the Research Council of Norway's support for the strategic project on climate services. FZJ gratefully acknowledges the computing time granted by the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC) and JARA-HPC provided on the supercomputer JURECA at J¨ulich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). We acknowledge the E-OBS dataset from the EU-FP6 project UERRA (https://www.uerra.eu) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the data providers in the ECA&D project (https://eca.knmi.nl).
Within the FP7 EUPORIAS project we have assessed the utility of dynamical and statistical downscaling to provide seasonal forecast for impact modelling in eastern Africa. An ensemble of seasonal hindcasts was generated by the global climate model (GCM) EC-EARTH and then downscaled by four regional climate models and by two statistical methods over eastern Africa with focus on Ethiopia. The five-month hindcast includes 15 members, initialised on May 1 st covering 1991–2012. There are two sub-regions where the global hindcast has some skill in predicting June–September rainfall (northern Ethiopia – northeast Sudan and southern Sudan - northern Uganda). The regional models are able to reproduce the predictive signal evident in the driving EC-EARTH hindcast over Ethiopia in June–September showing about the same performance as their driving GCM. Statistical downscaling, in general, loses a part of the EC-EARTH signal at grid box scale but shows some improvement after spatial aggregation. At the same time there are no clear evidences that the dynamical and statistical downscaling provide added value compared to the driving EC-EARTH if we define the added value as a higher forecast skill in the downscaled hindcast, although there is a tendency of improved reliability through the downscaling. The use of the global and downscaled hindcasts as input for the Livelihoods, Early Assessment and Protection (LEAP) platform of the World Food Programme in Ethiopia shows that the performance of the LEAP platform in predicting humanitarian needs at the national and sub-national levels is not improved by using downscaled seasonal forecasts. ; This work was done in the EUPORIAS project that received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for Research, under grant agreement 308291. ; Peer Reviewed
The European CORDEX (EURO-CORDEX) initiative is a large voluntary effort that seeks to advance regional climate and Earth system science in Europe. As part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) - Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), it shares the broader goals of providing a model evaluation and climate projection framework and improving communication with both the General Circulation Model (GCM) and climate data user communities. EURO-CORDEX oversees the design and coordination of ongoing ensembles of regional climate projections of unprecedented size and resolution (0.11° EUR-11 and 0.44° EUR-44 domains). Additionally, the inclusion of empirical-statistical downscaling allows investigation of much larger multi-model ensembles. These complementary approaches provide a foundation for scientific studies within the climate research community and others. The value of the EURO-CORDEX ensemble is shown via numerous peer-reviewed studies and its use in the development of climate services. Evaluations of the EUR-44 and EUR-11 ensembles also show the benefits of higher resolution. However, significant challenges remain. To further advance scientific understanding, two flagship pilot studies (FPS) were initiated. The first investigates local-regional phenomena at convection-permitting scales over central Europe and the Mediterranean in collaboration with the Med-CORDEX community. The second investigates the impacts of land cover changes on European climate across spatial and temporal scales. Over the coming years, the EURO-CORDEX community looks forward to closer collaboration with other communities, new advances, supporting international initiatives such as the IPCC reports, and continuing to provide the basis for research on regional climate impacts and adaptation in Europe. ; S.S. acknowledges the support of NOTUR/NORSTORE projects NN9280K/NS9001K and the Research Council of Norway and its basic institute support of the strategic project on Climate Services. E.K. acknowledges the support of the Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET) for provision of technical support and facilities (HPC-ARIS). L.S. and I.G. acknowledge the support of Croatian Science Foundation project CARE (2831) and Ministry of Environment and Energy project TF/HR/P3-M1-O1-0101 (www.prilagodba-klimi.hr). J. F. acknowledges support from the Spanish R+D Programme through grant INSIGNIA (CGL2016-79210-R), co-funded by ERDF/FEDER, and the Altamira Supercomputer at Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA-CSIC), member of the Spanish Supercomputing Network. P.T. acknowledges support from the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO) within the CORDEX.be (BR/143/A2) project, and the VSC (Flemish Supercomputer Center), funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) and the Flemish Government – department EWI.M.A.G. acknowledges support from the Spanish R+D Programme through grants CGL2013-47261-R and CGL2017-89583-R, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund. RF acknowledges support provided by ICHEC (Irish Centre for High End Computing) and the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. K.G. and S.K. gratefully acknowledge the computing time granted through JARA-HPC on the supercomputers JUROPA and JURECA at Forschungszentrum Jülich. M.B. and T.H. acknowledge support by The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports from the Large Infrastructures for Research, Experimental Development and Innovations project "IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center – LM2015070" and the INTER-EXCELLENCE program LTT17007, and support by Charles University from the PROGRES Q16 program. We acknowledge the approval and support of the two Flagship Pilot Studies (the FPS on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean and the FPS on Land Use and Climate Across Scales) by WRCP CORDEX. We thank Merja Tölle for providing simulation CCLM5-0-9-JLU as contribution to the CORDEX-FPS "Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean". D. M., M.P., and H.T. gratefully acknowledge the support received via the projects HighEnd:Extremes, SPIRIT, and reclip:convex, funded by the Austrian Climate Research Programme (ACRP) of the Klima- und Energiefonds (nos. B368608, B960272, and B769999, respectively), as well as the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) for compute time on JURECA through the grant JJSC39 and the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC) through the grants 70992 and 71193. ; Peer reviewed
