Do Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Models Improve Projections of Future Precipitation Change?

Kendon, Elizabeth J.; Ban, Nikolina; Roberts, Nigel; Fowler, Hayley J.; Roberts, Malcolm; Chan, Steven; Evans, Jason P.; Fosser, Giorgia; Wilkinson, Jonathan

doi:10.1175/bams-d-15-0004.1

Cited by 310 publications

(305 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The high resolution, convective permitting model allows more realistic representation of rainfall at a local scale, particularly for extreme events 13 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Major agricultural changes required to mitigate phosphorus losses under climate change

et al. 2017

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Phosphorus losses from land to water will be impacted by climate change and land management for food production, with detrimental impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Here we use a unique combination of methods to evaluate the impact of projected climate change on future phosphorus transfers, and to assess what scale of agricultural change would be needed to mitigate these transfers. We combine novel high-frequency phosphorus flux data from three representative catchments across the UK, a new high-spatial resolution climate model, uncertainty estimates from an ensemble of future climate simulations, two phosphorus transfer models of contrasting complexity and a simplified representation of the potential intensification of agriculture based on expert elicitation from land managers. We show that the effect of climate change on average winter phosphorus loads (predicted increase up to 30% by 2050s) will be limited only by large-scale agricultural changes (e.g., 20–80% reduction in phosphorus inputs).

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“…The high resolution, convective permitting model allows more realistic representation of rainfall at a local scale, particularly for extreme events 13 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Major agricultural changes required to mitigate phosphorus losses under climate change

et al. 2017

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“…GCMs also remain important for providing initial and boundary conditions for RCMs (e.g. Kendon et al, 2010), which now yield kilometre-scale climate simulations (Hohenegger et al, 2008;Kendon et al, 2014;Prein et al, 2015), allowing for convection-permitting simulations crucial for representing, in particular, sub-daily precipitation extremes Kendon et al, 2017) and the soil moistureprecipitation feedback (Hohenegger et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mean and extreme precipitation over European river basins better simulated in a 25 km AGCM

Schiemann

Vidale

Shaffrey

et al. 2018

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Limited spatial resolution is one of the factors that may hamper applications of global climate models (GCMs), in particular over Europe with its complex coastline and orography. In this study, the representation of European mean and extreme precipitation is evaluated in simulations with an atmospheric GCM (AGCM) at different resolutions between about 135 and 25 km grid spacing in the mid-latitudes. The continent-wide root-mean-square error in mean precipitation in the 25 km model is about 25 % smaller than in the 135 km model in winter. Clear improvements are also seen in autumn and spring, whereas the model's sensitivity to resolution is very small in summer. Extreme precipitation is evaluated by estimating generalised extreme value distributions (GEVs) of daily precipitation aggregated over river basins whose surface area is greater than 50 000 km 2 . GEV location and scale parameters are measures of the typical magnitude and of the interannual variability of extremes, respectively. Median model biases in both these parameters are around 10 % in summer and around 20 % in the other seasons. For some river basins, however, these biases can be much larger and take values between 50 % and 100 %. Extreme precipitation is better simulated in the 25 km model, especially during autumn when the median GEV parameter biases are more than halved, and in the North European Plains, from the Loire in the west to the Vistula in the east. A sensitivity experiment is conducted showing that these resolution sensitivities in both mean and extreme precipitation are in many areas primarily due to the increase in resolution of the model orography. The findings of this study illustrate the improved capability of a global high-resolution model in simulating European mean and extreme precipitation.

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“…Regional models are increasingly being used for climate studies at resolutions of several kilometers (Kendon et al 2017). One could argue that this approach mitigates the need for refinements to global model resolutions.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Benefits of Global High Resolution for Climate Simulation: Process Understanding and the Enabling of Stakeholder Decisions at the Regional Scale

Roberts

Vidale

Senior

et al. 2018

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

128

107

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The time scales of the Paris Climate Agreement indicate urgent action is required on climate policies over the next few decades, in order to avoid the worst risks posed by climate change. On these relatively short time scales the combined effect of climate variability and change are both key drivers of extreme events, with decadal time scales also important for infrastructure planning. Hence, in order to assess climate risk on such time scales, we require climate models to be able to represent key aspects of both internally driven climate variability and the response to changing forcings. In this paper we argue that we now have the modeling capability to address these requirements—specifically with global models having horizontal resolutions considerably enhanced from those typically used in previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) exercises. The improved representation of weather and climate processes in such models underpins our enhanced confidence in predictions and projections, as well as providing improved forcing to regional models, which are better able to represent local-scale extremes (such as convective precipitation). We choose the global water cycle as an illustrative example because it is governed by a chain of processes for which there is growing evidence of the benefits of higher resolution. At the same time it comprises key processes involved in many of the expected future climate extremes (e.g., flooding, drought, tropical and midlatitude storms).

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Do Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Models Improve Projections of Future Precipitation Change?

Cited by 310 publications

References 51 publications

Major agricultural changes required to mitigate phosphorus losses under climate change

Major agricultural changes required to mitigate phosphorus losses under climate change

Mean and extreme precipitation over European river basins better simulated in a 25 km AGCM

The Benefits of Global High Resolution for Climate Simulation: Process Understanding and the Enabling of Stakeholder Decisions at the Regional Scale

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