Attribution of a warmer climate on temperature extremes over Europe using high-resolution storyline simulations with ICON-CLM

Besides ongoing research on general future climate changes, the actual attribution of changed climatic conditions on single extreme events becomes an important topic. The focus of this study is to place historical European temperature extremes into a warmer climate context using the storyline approach. Global storyline simulations show that local near-surface temperature anomalies during a heat wave can be significantly amplified compared to the mean global warming level. To refine these results and for a better process understanding, the storylines produced with the global model of the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI-CM1; also contributing to CMIP6) are dynamically downscaled with ICON-CLM to the EURO-CORDEX domain (12km) and subsequently nested into a extended Germany domain on convection-permitting scale (3km). After a validation of the present-day ICON-CLM simulation against reanalyses and observations, the dynamical downscaling of two storylines corresponding to the 2K and 4K global warming levels have been performed. In this study, we present results of a case study considering the development of the European heat wave of 2019 at different warming levels with focus on regional temperature anomalies and feedbacks that might cause them. Additionally, the results are compared to the classical EURO-CORDEX CMIP6 projections.