Climate indicators for high-impact weather events as droughts and temperature extremes over the Iberian Peninsula with convection permitting scale simulations

The dynamical downscaling of global circulation models (GCMs) with regional climate models (RCMs) is a computationally expensive process, even more so running at the convection permitting scale (CP). The high-resolution product of these simulations is an important factor for consideration and is relevant to provide a  proper characterization of climate extremes, to address hazard assessment and manage associated risk. Moreover, an increasing number of studies shows improvements in regional climate model performances at CP scale if compared to their driving RCMs. The assessment of extreme events indicators, as defined by the joint CCl/WCRP/JCOMM Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI), is here proposed over the Iberian peninsula using CP simulations at around 3km of resolution for evaluation experiment as well as for future spans. The same indicators are also assessed for the available observations and for the driving RCM simulation at around 12km of resolution. Such approach allows, from one side to evaluate the results of CP simulation by comparison against observations and, on the other one, to quantify if there are any improvement by comparison against RCM simulation at a coarser resolution. Then, indicators are calculated in a near future 10 years-long period from both CP and RCM simulations, in order to highlight the differences in the climate projections. The selected indicators as consecutive dry days and maximum value of daily maximum temperature are strictly connected to high-impact events as droughts and temperature extremes. Their exploiting provide useful information about the expected changes in next decades due to the climate warming.