Indicators of extreme hazards in regional and convection-permitting climate models from the EU-Impetus4Change project

Europe suffers great financial loss and loss of life every year due to extreme events, particularly heat waves, flooding, droughts, and wildfires. The impacts of these events are increasing with both the increasing exposure of society and the increasing intensity and frequency of the events themselves under a warming climate. Accurate projections of the future changes in extreme events are vital for those stakeholders responsible for preparing the European cities to withstand future extreme events. They are also highly valuable to many industries which are heavily exposed to the impacts of extreme events, including insurance, construction, agriculture, health and energy. However, any adaptation requires information that is tailored to the needs and workflow of the decision makers.

In the EU-Impetus4Change project (I4C), we worked with stakeholders from four cities across Europe to select hazard indicators that are relevant to their ongoing adaptation work. The cities of Paris, Prague, Barcelona, and Bergen, were selected because they represent a wide range of climates across Europe and because they provide a sample of the different types of hazardous events faced by most European cities. The selected indicators focus primarily on extreme temperatures and precipitation hazards, though some relate to other sectors including energy and human health. The indicators have been calculated in 67 Euro-CORDEX simulations covering 120 years from 1980 to 2100 at a horizontal resolution of 0.11°. They have also been calculated in various convection permitting simulations of 10-year time slices in the current, mid-century and end of century, with a horizontal resolution of 3 km. This talk will present highlights from the analysis of this unique dataset, show the projected changes in these stakeholder-relevant indicators across different Global Warming Levels (GWLs), explore the biases compared to reanalysis, and examine the improvements of the convection permitting simulations compared to the lower resolution Euro-CORDEX simulations. The full dataset of these indices is planned to be made openly available through an online, user-friendly toolkit as part of the ongoing I4C project.