Resolution effects on regional climate model simulations of seasonal precipitation over Europe

Rauscher, Sara A.; Coppola, Erika; Piani, C.; Giorgi, Filippo

doi:10.1007/s00382-009-0607-7

Cited by 205 publications

(200 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…This confirms the finding that higher resolution results in more extreme precipitation in climate models (Jacob et al, 2014). The increasing skill of RCMs with increasing model resolution for simulation of the spatio-temporal characteristics of summer precipitation has been found by using the high-resolution models, although it is limited in application (Rauscher et al, 2010;Kendon et al, 2012). Nevertheless, a comparison between the CCLM outputs of different resolu- Figure 5.…”

Section: Validation Of Precipitation Simulationssupporting

confidence: 81%

Local impact analysis of climate change on precipitation extremes: are high-resolution climate models needed for realistic simulations?

Tabari

Troch

Giot

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. This study explores whether climate models with higher spatial resolutions provide higher accuracy for precipitation simulations and/or different climate change signals. The outputs from two convection-permitting climate models (ALARO and CCLM) with a spatial resolution of 3-4 km are compared with those from the coarse-scale driving models or reanalysis data for simulating/projecting daily and sub-daily precipitation quantiles. Validation of historical design precipitation statistics derived from intensityduration-frequency (IDF) curves shows a better match of the convection-permitting model results with the observationsbased IDF statistics compared to the driving GCMs and reanalysis data. This is the case for simulation of local subdaily precipitation extremes during the summer season, while the convection-permitting models do not appear to bring added value to simulation of daily precipitation extremes. Results moreover indicate that one has to be careful in assuming spatial-scale independency of climate change signals for the delta change downscaling method, as highresolution models may show larger changes in extreme precipitation. These larger changes appear to be dependent on the timescale, since such intensification is not observed for daily timescales for both the ALARO and CCLM models.

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Section: Validation Of Precipitation Simulationssupporting

confidence: 81%

Local impact analysis of climate change on precipitation extremes: are high-resolution climate models needed for realistic simulations?

Tabari

Troch

Giot

et al. 2016

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The next collaborative effort, ENSEMBLES (Hewitt 2004;van der Linden and Mitchell 2009), applied spatial resolutions of 25 km. Although high-resolution models improve the accuracy of spatio-temporal precipitation characteristics, all ENSEMBLES RCMs exhibit a wet bias of about 20% in winter and about 10% in summer (Rauscher et al 2010). In the downscaling experiments with COSMO-CLM (CCLM, COnsortium for Small-scale MOdelingClimate Limited-area Model; Rockel et al 2008), named consortional runs, resolution increased further down to 18 km (Hollweg et al 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Tölle

Schefczyk

Gutjahr

2017

Theor Appl Climatol

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A warmer climate is projected for mid-Europe, with less precipitation in summer, but with intensified extremes of precipitation and near-surface temperature. However, the extent and magnitude of such changes are associated with creditable uncertainty because of the limitations of model resolution and parameterizations. Here, we present the results of convection-permitting regional climate model simulations for Germany integrated with the COSMO-CLM using a horizontal grid spacing of 1.3 km, and additional 4.5-and 7-km simulations with convection parameterized. Of particular interest is how the temperature and precipitation fields and their extremes depend on the horizontal resolution for current and future climate conditions. The spatial variability of precipitation increases with resolution because of more realistic orography and physical parameterizations, but values are overestimated in summer and over mountain ridges in all simulations compared to observations. The spatial variability of temperature is improved at a resolution of 1.3 km, but the results are cold-biased, especially in summer. The increase in resolution from 7/4.5 km to 1.3 km is accompanied by less future warming in summer by 1 Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany precipitation extremes will be more severe, and temperature extremes will not exclusively increase with higher resolution. Although the differences between the resolutions considered (7/4.5 km and 1.3 km) are small, we find that the differences in the changes in extremes are large. High-resolution simulations require further studies, with effective parameterizations and tunings for different topographic regions. Impact models and assessment studies may benefit from such high-resolution model results, but should account for the impact of model resolution on model processes and climate change.

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“…This, combined with a refined representation of topography and surface heterogeneity, might help improve the realism of simulated precipitation (e.g., [4,[6][7][8][9]). State-of-the-art climate downscaling studies for seasonal and longer time scales have so far adopted a horizontal resolution within the range of 12-50 km (e.g., [9][10][11][12][13][14][15]). On the other hand, previous studies that adopted a higher resolution (e.g., 3 km) to determine the sensitivity of rainfall on model resolution and convective parameterization are mostly restricted to short-term weather prediction (e.g., [16,17]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Climate Simulation for Arizona: Impact of Resolution on Precipitation

Sharma

Huang

2012

Advances in Meteorology

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This study performs regional climate simulations for Arizona, a region with complicated terrain. The dependence of simulated rainfall on model resolution is explore by climate downscaling experiments using the Weather Research and Forecasting model. The model's horizontal resolution was refined from 12 to 6, then to 3 km. The total rainfall for winter and for different subdomains of Arizona is found to increase substantially with the refinement from 12 to 6 km grid. A further refinement to 3 km leads to a smaller change in rainfall, indicating numerical convergence at that scale. Comparisons with observations revealed that the 6 and 3 km runs produced excessive rainfall for winter while the 12 km simulations are closer to observation. This implies that the parameterization schemes for rainfall are not resolution independent, thus a refinement of resolution does not guarantee better results. It cautions against hastily pushing for increasingly higher resolution in practical downscaling simulations. An analysis of the simulated hourly rainfall shows that the 3 km runs produce significantly more extreme rainfall events than the 12 km runs. The 6 and 3 km runs also produced more complicated spatial patterns of seasonal rainfall and vertical velocity, reflecting the influence of fine-scale topography.

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Resolution effects on regional climate model simulations of seasonal precipitation over Europe

Cited by 205 publications

References 38 publications

Local impact analysis of climate change on precipitation extremes: are high-resolution climate models needed for realistic simulations?

Local impact analysis of climate change on precipitation extremes: are high-resolution climate models needed for realistic simulations?

Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Regional Climate Simulation for Arizona: Impact of Resolution on Precipitation

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