4-9 September 2022, Bonn, Germany
EMS Annual Meeting Abstracts
Vol. 19, EMS2022-556, 2022, updated on 09 Jan 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-556
EMS Annual Meeting 2022
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Multi-decadal convection-permitting climate simulation over Svalbard and its benefit for assessing the future of cultural heritage sites

Oskar Landgren, Julia Lutz, Andreas Dobler, and Ketil Isaksen
Oskar Landgren et al.
  • Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Model and climate analysis, OSLO, Norway (oskar.landgren@met.no)

The High Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is one of the fastest-warming locations on the planet. In addition to melting snow and ice which threatens a vulnerable ecosystem, thawing permafrost destabilises slopes, coastlines and man-made structures and exposes especially cultural heritage objects. Preserving the numerous cultural heritage objects is challenging because on Svalbard they receive protected status automatically if they are older than 1946. In the PCCH-Arctic project, we study the influence of climate change on cultural heritage sites, including among others the wooden houses in Ny-Ålesund and the coal cableway in Longyearbyen. To gain meaningful climate information on specific sites we apply a high-resolution regional climate model.
Traditionally, these high-resolution convection-permitting datasets have been produced in separate time windows for historical and future periods. However, some cryospheric phenomena such as permafrost and glaciers require longer transient simulations.
We here present a high-resolution climate projection dataset covering Svalbard for the years 1991-2060 at 2.5 km horizontal resolution. The simulation is produced by the regional climate model HARMONIE Climate (HCLIM) cycle 43 featuring convection-permitting HARMONIE-AROME atmospheric physics and SURFEX land-surface model with ISBA Explicit Snow snow scheme and Simple Ice (SICE) prognostic sea ice thickness. Boundary data comes from the Norwegian Earth System model (NorESM2-MM) following the SSP5-8.5 scenario. We present projected future changes in distributions, focusing on precipitation and snow, and evaluate against ERA5 and CARRA reanalyses. We also discuss spatial variability and representation of small-scale features in a challenging landscape with steep topography and large contrasts between land, sea-ice and open ocean.

How to cite: Landgren, O., Lutz, J., Dobler, A., and Isaksen, K.: Multi-decadal convection-permitting climate simulation over Svalbard and its benefit for assessing the future of cultural heritage sites, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-556, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-556, 2022.

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