Assessment of extreme winds over Europe in Regional Climate Models

Every year, extreme wind events cause a great deal of financial losses across Europe. As such, the accurate projection of the changes in extreme winds will be invaluable for many industries, including insurance, construction, energy, and afforestation. Adaptation planning requires the estimation of how the magnitude and frequency of extreme events, such as extreme winds, will vary in the future.

Extreme winds are examined in a selection of Euro-CORDEX downscalings. Since these include multiple downscalings of the same global climate models by different regional climate models, it is possible to intercompare how different models represent extreme winds. The peaks-over-threshold approach is used identify the extreme events based on the fitted Generalized Pareto Distributions (GPD), and maps of 30-year return winds for all locations over Europe are presented. Future changes in the frequency of extreme winds are assessed for Northern, Central, and Sothern Europe for three future periods, being the near, mid, and end of this century. The results show that the frequency of extreme wind events will increase from one period to the next over the 21^st century in all three regions of Europe.

The results of the recently published study will be presented in detail along with a brief overview of the statistical methods employed. Our ongoing work to create a comprehensive dataset of assessed extreme winds and precipitation will also be addressed. Time permitting, we will present evidence of the benefits of downscaling, an assessment of how the base period length affects the uncertainties, and a brief comparison of the different methods commonly employed to assess uncertainties.