European daily precipitation according to EURO-CORDEX regional climate models (RCMs) and high-resolution global climate models (GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP)
<p>In this study, we evaluate a set of high-resolution (25–50 km horizontal grid spacing) global climate models (GCMs) from the High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP), developed as part of the EU-funded PRIMAVERA (Process-based climate simulation: Advances in hig...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2020-11-01
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| Series: | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Online Access: | https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/13/5485/2020/gmd-13-5485-2020.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>In this study, we evaluate a set of high-resolution (25–50 km
horizontal grid spacing) global climate models (GCMs) from the
High-Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP), developed as
part of the EU-funded PRIMAVERA (Process-based climate simulation: Advances in high resolution modelling and European climate risk assessment) project, and from the EURO-CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) regional
climate models (RCMs) (12–50 km horizontal grid spacing) over a European
domain. It is the first time that an assessment of regional climate
information using ensembles of both GCMs and RCMs at similar horizontal
resolutions has been possible. The focus of the evaluation is on the
distribution of daily precipitation at a 50 km scale under current climate
conditions. Both the GCM and RCM ensembles are evaluated against
high-quality gridded observations in terms of spatial resolution and station
density. We show that both ensembles outperform GCMs from the 5th Coupled
Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), which cannot capture the
regional-scale precipitation distribution properly because of their coarse
resolutions. PRIMAVERA GCMs generally simulate precipitation distributions
within the range of EURO-CORDEX RCMs. Both ensembles perform better in
summer and autumn in most European regions but<span id="page5486"/> tend to overestimate
precipitation in winter and spring. PRIMAVERA shows improvements in the
latter by reducing moderate-precipitation rate biases over central and
western Europe. The spatial distribution of mean precipitation is also
improved in PRIMAVERA. Finally, heavy precipitation simulated by PRIMAVERA
agrees better with observations in most regions and seasons, while CORDEX
overestimates precipitation extremes. However, uncertainty exists in the
observations due to a potential undercatch error, especially during heavy-precipitation events.</p>
<p>The analyses also confirm previous findings that, although the spatial
representation of precipitation is improved, the effect of increasing
resolution from 50 to 12 km horizontal grid spacing in EURO-CORDEX daily
precipitation distributions is, in comparison, small in most regions and
seasons outside mountainous regions and coastal regions. Our results show
that both high-resolution GCMs and CORDEX RCMs provide adequate information
to end users at a 50 km scale.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1991-959X 1991-9603 |