Projections of extreme rainfall and floods in Mediterranean basins from an ensemble of convection-permitting models

Floods have major impacts in the Mediterranean regions, but their evolution with climate change is unclear. This issue is related to the inadequacy of climate and hydrological models in terms of spatial and temporal resolutions to simulate flash floods over small basins. This study explores future flood scenarios of 12 Mediterranean basins using meteorological forcings from an ensemble of high-resolution convection-permitting climate models. Results indicate an overall increase in flood intensity across all basins, particularly for the most severe events, but also a strong spatial variability of the climate change signal given the geographic location and catchment characteristics. There is a good agreement between the models towards an increase of hourly rainfall extremes, but these changes are not well correlated with changes in floods, indicating that rainfall intensity alone is a poor predictor of future floods. An overall conclusion towards an increase of floods in this region is limited by the short length of the available high-resolution climate simulations. Longer time series are required to better assess the robustness of the projected changes.