On the evidence of orographic modulation of regional fine scale climate change signals based on raw and bias-adjusted CORDEX data: The Carpathians

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges in history. On the one hand, climate models can be useful tools for providing information on climate change, but on the other hand climate model simulations’ outputs are prone to biases compared to observations, which can be somewhat overcome by different bias‑adjustment techniques. Being the European branches of the international initiative called COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX): EURO-CORDEX and Med-CORDEX provide regional climate model (RCM) simulations targeting Europe. Present research focuses on precipitation and temperature change over sub-regions within the Carpathian Basin based on raw and bias-adjusted RCM data under the RCP8.5 scenario. The quality controlled and homogenized CARPATCLIM served as reference dataset for the bias-adjustment. The investigations explore temperature and precipitation changes by the end of the century (2070-2099) with respect to 1976-2005. The comparative research seeks answer the question: how climate change will manifest in heavy rainfall and other temperature related climate indices over regions characterized by different topography?