EGU2020-21769
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21769
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Evaluation of trends in extreme temperatures simulated by HighResMIP models across Europe

Gerard van der Schrier1, Antonello Squintu1, Else van den Besselaar1, Eveline van der Linden2, Enrico Scoccimarro3, Christopher Roberts4, Retish Senan4, Dian Putrasahan5, Malcolm Roberts6, and Albert Klein Tank2,6
Gerard van der Schrier et al.
  • 1Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Observations and Data Technology, De Bilt, Netherlands (schrier@knmi.nl)
  • 2Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
  • 3Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Lecce, Italy
  • 4European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom
  • 5Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany
  • 6Met Office, Exeter, United Kingdom

The comparison of simulated climate with observed daily values allows to assess their reliability and the soundness of their projections on the climate of the future. Frequency and amplitude of extreme events are fundamental aspects that climate simulations need to reproduce. In this work six models developed within the High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project are compared over Europe with the homogenized version of the observational E-OBS gridded dataset. This is done by comparing averages, extremes and trends of the simulated summer maximum temperature and winter minimum temperatures with the observed ones.

Extreme values have been analyzed making use of indices based on the exceedances of percentile-based thresholds. Winter minimum temperatures are generally underestimated by models in their averages (down to -4 deg. C of difference over Italy and Norway) while simulated trends in averages and extreme values are found to be too warm on western Europe and too cold on eastern Europe (e.g. up to a difference of -4% per decade on the number of Cold Nights over Spain). On the other hand the models tend to underestimate summer maximum temperatures averages in Northern Europe and overestimate them in the Mediterranean areas (up to +5 deg. C over the Balkans). The simulated trends are too warm on the North West part and too cold on the South East part of Europe (down to -3%/dec. on the number of Warm Days over Italy and Western Balkans).

These results corroborate the findings of previous studies about the underestimation of the warming trends of summer temperatures in Southern Europe, where these are more intense and have more impacts.  A comparison of the high resolution models  with the corresponding version in CMIP5 has been performed comparing the absolute biases of extreme values trends. This has shown a slight improvement for the simulation of winter minimum temperatures, while no signs of significant progresses have been found for summer maximum temperatures.

How to cite: van der Schrier, G., Squintu, A., van den Besselaar, E., van der Linden, E., Scoccimarro, E., Roberts, C., Senan, R., Putrasahan, D., Roberts, M., and Klein Tank, A.: Evaluation of trends in extreme temperatures simulated by HighResMIP models across Europe, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-21769, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-21769, 2020

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