Validation of a High-Resolution Version of the Regional Climate Model RegCM3 over the Carpathian Basin

Abstract

This paper presents a validation study for a high-resolution version of the Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) over the Carpathian basin and its surroundings. The horizontal grid spacing of the model is 10 km—the highest reached by RegCM3. The ability of the model to capture temporal and spatial variability of temperature and precipitation over the region of interest is evaluated using metrics spanning a wide range of temporal (daily to climatology) and spatial (inner domain average to local) scales against different observational datasets. The simulated period is 1961–90. RegCM3 shows small temperature biases but a general overestimation of precipitation, especially in winter; although, this overestimate may be artificially enhanced by uncertainties in observations. The precipitation bias over the Hungarian territory, the authors’ main area of interest, is mostly less than 20%. The model captures well the observed late twentieth-century decadal-to-interannual and interseasonal variability. On short time scales, simulated daily temperature and precipitation show a high correlation with observations, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9 for temperature and 0.6 for precipitation. Comparison with two Hungarian station time series shows that the model performance does not degrade when going to the 10-km gridpoint scale. Finally, the model reproduces the spatial distribution of dry and wet spells over the region. Overall, it is assessed that this high-resolution version of RegCM3 is of sufficiently good quality to perform climate change experiments over the Carpathian region—and, in particular, the Hungarian territory—for application to impact and adaptation studies.

Scaling precipitation extremes with temperature in the Mediterranean: past climate assessment and projection in anthropogenic scenarios

“…E-OBS has been widely used for regional climate model evaluation (e.g. Lorenz and Jacob 2010;Nikulin et al 2011;Samuelsson et al 2011;Torma et al 2011;Flaounas et al 2013;Stéfanon et al 2014) and has been comprehensively evaluated in the literature (Hofstra et al 2009(Hofstra et al , 2010Kysel and Plavcov 2010;Flaounas et al 2012;Herrera et al 2012). In the E-OBS version 10 used here substantial improvements were realized, especially by increasing the station density (around 2000 for v1 and v2 vs. more than 4200 stations for temperature and more than 7300 for precipitation in v10).…”

The future climate characteristics of the Carpathian Basin based on a regional climate model mini-ensemble

“…It can be seen from the validation process that the applied models carry different kind of errors. More details about the validation results can be found in Csima and Horányi (2008); Torma et al (2008); Szépszó and Horányi (2008); Bartholy et al (2009). This information is essential for the further development of these RCMs.…”

“…The following models are applied in Hungary and their results are examined in this paper: (i) ALADIN-Climate model (Spiridonov et al, 2005) developed by Météo France within an international cooperation; (ii) PRECIS model (Wilson et al, 2005) available from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre; (iii) RegCM model (Giorgi et al, 1993a, b) originally developed at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and improved at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste (it has to be mentioned here that a tuned and calibrated version of the model was applied in order to reduce the model biases for the Carpathian Basin; Torma et al, 2008); and (iv) REMO model (Jacob and Podzun, 1997) developed by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg.…”

Effects of the climate change on regional ozone dry deposition

“…RegCM has originally been developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and has been mostly applied to studies of the regional climate and the seasonal predictability around the world. The 3.1 model version has been adapted and used at the Eötvös Loránd University (Torma et al, 2008). The horizontal resolution of the model database is 10 km and the model domain is from 45.73 • N to 48.70…”

“…These initial meteorological fields are used to compare future results to the reference period. Results with initial conditions from the ERA40 database are compared with the CRU climate database to verify the regional climate model (Torma et al, 2008). In our study the comparison in changes of the ozone deposition velocity for the future are obtained by similar manner.…”