A Regional Climate Simulation Study Using WRF-ARW Model over Europe and Evaluation for Extreme Temperature Weather Events

Abstract

In this study regional climate simulations of Europe over the 60-year period made using a 25 km resolution WRF model with NCEP 2.5 degree analysis for initial/boundary conditions are presented for air temperature and extreme events of heat and cold waves. The E-OBS 25 km analysis data sets are used for model validation. Results suggest that WRF could simulate the temperature trends (mean, maximum, minimum, seasonal maximum, and minimum) over most parts of Europe except over Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean, and coastal regions. Model could simulate the slight fall of temperatures from 1950 to 1970 as well as steady rise in temperatures from 1970 to 2010 over Europe. Simulations show occurrence of about 80% of the total heat waves in the period 1970-2010 with maximum number of heat/cold wave episodes over Eastern and Central Europe in good agreement with observations. Relatively poor correlations and high bias are found for heat/cold wave episodes over the complex topographic areas of Iberia and Mediterranean regions where land surface processes play important role in local climate. The poor simulation of temperatures over the above regions could be due to deficiencies in representation of topography and surface physics which need further sensitivity studies.

An Analysis of Regional Climate Simulations for Western Australia’s Wine Regions—Model Evaluation and Future Climate Projections

“…Andrys et al (2015) highlighted a prominent cold bias for maximum temperatures in these WRF simulations of SWWA climate. This deficiency in WRF has also been highlighted in other regional climate studies for SWWA , United States (Zhang et al 2009), and Europe (Dasari et al 2014;Heikkilä et al 2011;Katragkou et al 2015;Soares et al 2012). However, the viticulturerelated indices evaluated in the present study include HI, which incorporates an average of maximum and minimum temperatures, and CI, which is the average minimum temperature in March.…”

Heat tolerance is more variable than cold tolerance across species of Iberian lizards after controlling for intraspecific variation

“…Working with ants, Baudier, D'Amelio, Malhotra, O'Connor, and O'Donnell (2018) found stronger correlation of CT max (relative to CT min ) with local elevational and temperature ranges, and postulated that such contrast could be signalling that temperature anomalies are driving CT max variation alone in an adaptive manner. If this was the case in our study area, the larger variation in CT max across our study lizard species could be indicative of modern microevolutionary responses to the ongoing increase in the frequency and severity of heatwaves (Dasari, Salgado, Perdigao, & Challa, 2014) and droughts in the Mediterranean basin (Araújo, Thuiller, & Pearson, 2006;Marvel et al, 2019;Russo, Gouveia, Dutra, Soares, & Machado Trigo, 2019).…”

Urban–rural differences in near‐surface air temperature as resolved by the Central Europe Refined analysis (CER): sensitivity to planetary boundary layer schemes and urban canopy models

“…Several studies address and summarise the current state of the art and unresolved problems in meso-scale urban climate models (e.g., Martilli, 2007;Hidalgo et al, 2008;Chen et al, 2011;Grimmond et al, 2011;Ng et al, 2012;Best and Grimmond, 2015). A frequently observed problem in model-based studies are cold biases in T2 (e.g., Hu et al, 2010;Xie et al, 2012;Garcia-Diez et al, 2013;Dasari et al, 2014;Kleczek et al, 2014). Cold biases can seriously affect, for example, the detection of heat waves and could lead to fewer identified heat events as studied for Europe by Dasari et al (2014).…”