Skip to main content
European Commission logo print header

Regionalisation of anthropogenic climate change simulations

Objective

To obtain increased accuracy of regional simulations of climate
and climate change over Europe.


Variable resolution atmospheric general circulation models
(AGCMs) and high resolution limited area models, developed and
tested in the Regionalization project, will be applied in
time-slice regionalizations of coarser coupled atmosphere-ocean
general circulation models (AOGCMs) control and scenario
simulations.

Three high resolution atmospheric limited area models (ALAMs)
will be used to "regionalize" new climate simulations from second
generation AOGCMs. The lateral boundary fields, SSTs and sea-ice
fields will be taken from outputs of three AOGCMs (at NCAR, MPIM
and UKMO). 5-10 year time-slice ALAM simulations driven by output
from present (control) and transiently increasing greenhouse
gases (scenario) experiments will be made.

Similar time-slice simulations will be
made with an AGCM (METEO FRANCE's ARPEGE) using stretched
coordinates with highest resolution over Europe. The SSTs and
sea-ice fields will be taken from one of the above mentioned
sets of AOGCM simulations (made with coarser homogeneous
resolution).

A special study will investigate whether ocean SST
simulation (in casu the Atlantic SSTs off the Portuguese coast)
can be improved using an ocean limited area model (OLAM). Very
high resolution climate simulations will be made for specific
regions in Europe (northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula) by
driving very high resolution ALAMs with output from the high
resolution ALAM simulations.

For the greater Alpine area a
statistical dynamic methodology will be used to give similar
very high resolution simulations. The methodology combines the use
of a mesoscale dynamical model with a statistical classification
scheme for the large scale flow regime.

Finally a purely statistical downscaling methodology will be used
to simulate the local climate at a few Danish stations. This
methodology will use statistical relations between "observed"
large scale flow patterns and local weather.

The various regional and local climate simulations based on the
AOGCM control simulations will be intercompared and evaluated
against climatological data in order to estimate upper bounds for
the accuray of the corresponding simulated climate changes
produced from the AOGCM scenario simulations.

Call for proposal

Data not available

Coordinator

MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FOERDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN E.V.
EU contribution
No data
Address
Bundesstra¯e 55
20146 HAMBURG
Germany

See on map

Total cost
No data

Participants (7)