Assessment of the horizontal resolution and an emission inventory in two different regional climate models in the FOCI project

The FOCI project (“Non-CO2 Forcers and their Climate, Weather, Air Quality and Health Impacts”, https://www.project-foci.eu/wp/) aims to better understand the impacts of key non-CO2 radiative forcers, to assess where and how they arise, and their impact on the climate system, with a final goal of providing tools to investigate mitigation and adaptation policies incorporated in selected scenarios of future development, targeted at Europe and other regions of the world. As part of the Work Package 4 from the FOCI project, which is responsible for tuning, testing and performing the long-term simulations with different regional models downscaling reanalysis and global climate models, we present an assessment of initial tests in WRF and RegCM5 with different domains over Europe. This study is divided into two parts: assessing the impact of 1) the chemistry in the 27-km domain that covers Europe, by comparing with a control simulation and a reference data, and 2) the nested 9 and 3-km domains on meteorological variables, such as precipitation, temperature, and horizontal winds. The 3 km convection-permitting (CP) simulations cover the city of Prague, one of the satellite cities from FOCI project, and an extreme weather event will also be evaluated. Data from ERA5 and assimilated chemistry by Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) are used as boundary conditions, and E-OBS for validation the outputs. Some results show that simulations with chemistry tend to be slightly drier and warmer compared with no chemistry. Furthermore, although overestimating the precipitation over the Czech Republic territory, the 3-km CP simulation shows improvement in capturing the peaks of precipitation for the event.