An inter-comparison of regional climate models for Europe: model performance in present-day climate

Abstract

The analysis of possible regional climate changes over Europe as simulated by ten regional climate models within the context of PRUDENCE requires a careful investigation of possible systematic biases in the models. The purpose of this paper is to identify how the main model systematic biases vary across the different models.Two fundamental aspects of model validation are addressed here: the ability to simulate i) the longterm (30 or 40 years) mean climate and ii) the inter-annual variability. The analysis concentrates on near-surface air temperature and precipitation over land and focuses mainly on winter and summer.In general, there is a warm bias with respect to the CRU data set in these extreme seasons and a tendency to cold biases in the transition seasons. In winter the typical spread (standard deviation) between the models is 1K. During summer there is generally a better agreement between observed and simulated values of inter-annual variability although there is a relatively clear signal that the modeled temperature variability is larger than suggested by observations, while precipitation variability is closer to observations. The areas with warm (cold) bias in winter generally exhibit wet (dry) biases, whereas the relationship is the reverse during summer (though much less clear, coupling warm (cold) biases with dry (wet) ones). When comparing the RCMs with their driving GCM, they generally reproduce the large-scale circulation of the GCM though in some cases there are substantial differences between regional biases in surface temperature and precipitation.4

Impacts of climate change and land-use scenarios on Margaritifera margaritifera, an environmental indicator and endangered species

“…These models were selected for this study because they are both part of the European project PRUDENCE (Christensen et al, 2002), which comprises performance analyses on these simulations (e.g., Frei et al, 2006;Jacob et al, 2007), and because they resulted well in other studies carried out in Portugal (Gouveia et al, 2011;Ramos et al, 2011). To avoid preconception in the interpretation of results, two emission scenarios were modeled: B2 and A2, which forecast less and more severe impacts on future climate, respectively.…”

“…The HadRM3 simulations for the Iberian Peninsula reveal precipitation and temperature biases, which are smaller in winter and larger in summer (Jacob et al, 2007). When the aim is to forecast hydrological processes (present case), numerical simulations of climatic variables cannot be used without some form of data processing to remove the existing biases (Christensen et al, 2008;Sharma et al, 2007).…”

Iberian thermal lows in a changed climate

“…However, one might question the model's ability to describe the present-day climate. The ability of the PROMES model to simulate the 1961-1990 mean climate and interannual variability has been analyzed together with the other RCMs involved in the PRUDENCE project, showing a good agreement with the seasonal surface temperature and precipitation climatology in the IP (Jacob et al, 2007).…”

Multiscale Performance of the ALARO-0 Model for Simulating Extreme Summer Precipitation Climatology in Belgium

“…However, studies show that RCMs do not necessarily improve their driving GCM simulations or global reanalyses (e.g., Castro et al 2005;Jacob et al 2007;Sylla et al 2010). The use of nested LAMs or RCMs as a climate downscaling technique, indeed, involves a number of issues, one of which is related to the lateral boundary conditions (LBCs) (Giorgi and Mearns 1999;Denis et al 2002).…”