Future Projections of heat and cold stress based on two RCP Scenarios over Greece

Climate change will exert a considerable influence across the area of Greece with temperature and precipitation extreme events becoming more frequent creating significant impacts on many societal and economic sectors. Future projections based on a range of anthropogenic scenarios show that decreases of annual rainfall amounts associated with increases of heat-waves and droughts are anticipated in several regions of Greece. Τhe Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model has appropriately been set-up and parameterized with a high spatial resolution of 5 km for the area of Greece. Previous research has revealed the capability of the configured WRF high resolution model to reproduce the main climatological variables in this region, which is dominated by highly variable topographic characteristics. The scope of this study is to investigate climate change projections for indices that express human‐perceived temperature extremes such as the Humidity index (Humidex), Wind Chill index (WCI) and Heat stress index (HI) in order to evaluate the potential impact on human health. These indices use different meteorological variables or a combination of them such as temperature, relative humidity and wind speed. The computation of these indices is based on daily simulated data, under two different scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP 8.5) and periods (2025-2049 and 2075-2099) compared to present climate conditions (1980-2004). Downscaled results are derived from the global EC-EARTH model dataset, used for initial and boundary conditions. Our findings contribute to the quantification of future changes as well as on the identification of potential areas that might become prone to different degrees of heat/cold stress over the area of Greece.