Far future climate (2060–2100) of the northern Adriatic air–sea heat transfers associated with extreme bora events

Performance of the Adriatic Sea and Coast (AdriSC) climate component – a COAWST V3.3-based coupled atmosphere-ocean modelling suite: atmospheric part

“…The evaluation run covering the 1987-2017 period is partially presented in this study. The far-future runs (2070-2100 period) are derived with the Pseudo-Global Warming (PGW) methodology recently extended to coupled atmosphere-ocean models (Denamiel et al, 2020a) and tested for an ensemble of short-term extreme events in the Adriatic Sea (Denamiel et al, 2020a(Denamiel et al, , 2020b. In this climate configuration (Table 1) Mediterranean basin.…”

“…These events are indeed associated with strong sea surface cooling known to precondition the dense water formation and the thermohaline circulation of the Adriatic Sea (e.g. Artegiani et al, 1997;Orlić et al, 2007;Janeković et al, 2014;Vilibić et al, 2018;Denamiel et al, 2020b). It is thus expected that the detailed analysis of the 31-year long AdriSC climate evaluation run will provide, in a near future, more robust and more reliable results concerning the drivers of the BiOS, but also better representation of the orographically-driven wind storms and their impact on the ocean processes such as the Adriatic thermohaline circulation.…”

“…Furthermore, for climate projections, the pseudo-global warming (PGW) downscaling method (Schär et al, 1996) was proven to greatly improve the future projections of precipitations and convective storms in atmospheric kilometre-scale climate models (Prein et al, 2015). Consequently, this method was first extended to coupled atmosphere-ocean models, then implemented in the AdriSC climate component, and finally tested successfully with an ensemble of short-term climate simulations for wind-driven extreme events in the Adriatic Sea (Denamiel et al, 2020a(Denamiel et al, , 2020b). The need to use kilometre-scale models during severe bora events for proper representation of the Adriatic long-term thermohaline circulation was also demonstrated (Denamiel et al, 2021).…”

Performance of the Adriatic Sea and Coast (AdriSC) climate component – a COAWST V3.3-based coupled atmosphere-ocean modelling suite: ocean part

“…2070-2100 period) with the AdriSC long-term projections under climate change scenarios following the Pseudo-Global Warming (PGW; Schär et al, 1996) method. This method has already been tested successfully with the AdriSC model for an ensemble of short-term extreme events in the Adriatic Sea (Denamiel et al, 2020a(Denamiel et al, , 2020b. Therefore, the AdriSC climate simulations are expected to broaden the knowledge about the dynamics of the Adriatic-Ionian region.…”

“…Therefore, to quantify the impacts of climate change in the Adriatic, it is crucial to obtain an adequate representation at climate scales of the atmosphere-ocean interactions during extreme events which are, for example, driving the formation of dense water within the basin. Atmospheric RCMs generally fail to provide such a representation, especially in the northern Adriatic where they cannot be used to study the extreme bora dynamics (Denamiel et al, 2020b(Denamiel et al, , 2021a. Additionally, it has also been recently demonstrated that the latest higher resolution ECMWF reanalysis datasetthe ERA5 product (Hersbach et al, 2018), cannot be used either as a reference for climate model evaluation nor as a forcing for ocean models during bora events in the northern Adriatic as it also strongly underestimates the extreme bora speeds (Denamiel et al, 2021a).…”