Stakeholder relevant hazard indicators in regional climate models from the EU-Impetus4Change project

Extreme events cause great financial loss and loss of life across Europe every year, and while the impacts of these events are increasing due to society’s increasing exposure, the hazardous events themselves are projected to change. Accurate projections of these changes are invaluable for the stakeholders responsible for preparing the European cities to withstand future extreme events. They are also of great value and interest to many industries which are heavily exposed to the impacts of extreme events, including insurance, construction, and energy. However, any adaptation requires information that is tailored to the needs and workflow of the decision makers.

In the EU-funded Impetus4Change (I4C) project, we worked with stakeholders to select hazard indicators that are directly applicable to their ongoing work in adapting to climate change in four major European cities. The cities, Barcelona, Paris, Prague and Bergen, were selected because they face different hazardous events and represent a wide range of climates across Europe. There are 19 indicators in total, which primarily focus on extreme temperatures and precipitation, but which also include indices on drought and fire weather. These indicators have now been calculated in 67 models from the 0.11° simulations of EURO-CORDEX, covering all of Europe for the period of 1980 to 2100. They have also been calculated in numerous available convection-permitting simulations over sub-domains of Europe, at the higher horizontal resolution of 3 km. These indices are analyzed for both their changes over the timeseries but also at Global Warming Levels of 1, 1.5, 2, 3, and 4 degrees. In this talk we will present the first analysis of selected indices for the European domain. The full dataset of these indices is planned to be made openly available through an online, user-friendly toolkit as part of the I4C project.