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

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.