UP3.5 | Advancing understanding of Mediterranean climate: observed and future changes, variability, large-scale circulation and attribution of trends
Advancing understanding of Mediterranean climate: observed and future changes, variability, large-scale circulation and attribution of trends
Conveners: Matias Olmo, Ileana Bladé, Vicent Altava-Ortiz, Annalisa Cherchi
Orals
| Wed, 04 Sep, 09:00–10:30 (CEST)|Lecture room A-112
Posters
| Attendance Wed, 04 Sep, 18:00–19:30 (CEST) | Display Wed, 04 Sep, 08:00–Thu, 05 Sep, 13:00
Orals |
Wed, 09:00
Wed, 18:00
The warming trends detected in the observational record and future projections, accompanied by an increase in hydrological droughts, have designated the Mediterranean basin as one of the most responsive regions to global climate change. As the warming is expected to continue and intensify in the next decades, local communities and decision-makers call for improved climate information that would allow adaptation to changing climate conditions. In recent years, record-breaking temperatures have been registered –with annual-mean anomalies reaching up to 2.5 °C in mountainous regions during 2022 and 2023– together with large rainfall deficits impacting on different socio-economic activities and causing environmental damage over the western Mediterranean basin. In this context, a better understanding of the physical mechanisms driving long-term changes in the Mediterranean region, along with a comprehensive assessment of climate simulations, are crucial to increase our confidence in future projections and better estimate the climate risk.
This session aims to present the latest advances in studying the Mediterranean climate change, including the use of innovative approaches for the attribution of climatic trends and events and for process-based model evaluation. Studies of past long-term changes and future projections focused on validating simulated climate variability across time scales and reducing uncertainty are particularly encouraged. Analyses of specific climate hazards and the associated atmospheric circulation (including extremes, teleconnection patterns, and regional-to-local responses) are also welcome.

Orals: Wed, 4 Sep | Lecture room A-112

Chairpersons: Matias Olmo, Ileana Bladé
09:00–09:15
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EMS2024-509
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Onsite presentation
María Ortega, Claudia Gutiérrez, Noelia López-Franca, María Ofelia Molina, William Cabos, Dmitry Sein, and Enrique Sánchez

Regional winds are caused by small-scale pressure differences in a way that important air flows can arise in a very small and specific region. Sometimes an orographic feature, such as a channel like the Ebro Valley or the Strait of Gibraltar, lead the wind, due to mass conservation, to acquire a certain specific range of directions and considerable speed. For some regional winds in the Iberian Peninsula, such as Cierzo, Levante and Poniente, there are quantitative works on their properties through high-resolution reanalyses, but their possible changes under the influence of climate change have not been studied with models. This work proposes to investigate the capacity of several climate models, validated against reanalysis, to study Cierzo, Levante and Poniente main characteristics in the common period 1995-2011. To this end, regional wind algorithms to detect the flows have been proposed. Three models (REMO, MPIOM-REMO and CNRM-RCSM4) have been selected based on evaluation results. Then, a study of Cierzo, Levante and Poniente future changes under RCP 8.5 emissions scenario (2006-2099) has been carried out. This has been compared with its historical period (1950-2005). Results suggest that spatial resolution is key to detecting these winds, especially in inland flows such as Cierzo, but that the internal physics of each model are also a source of variation beyond 10-km spatial resolution. Low temporal resolutions introduce errors in regional wind days calculation, while coupling effects will depend on each flow. In general, all models are capable of simulating historical Cierzo (100-130 days), Levante and Poniente (150-160 days) frequencies similar to observations. Trend study suggests that Cierzo extension could decrease by 1.5% in a statistically significant manner by the end of the century. Results also show a strong increase of 10-20 annual Levante events depending on the model. Levante extension will vary significantly, although the models do not agree on trend sign. Poniente shows a weakening of its characteristics for all models. Specifically, a decrease in the number of annual Poniente events of 5-20 days is detected.

How to cite: Ortega, M., Gutiérrez, C., López-Franca, N., Molina, M. O., Cabos, W., Sein, D., and Sánchez, E.: Model Evaluation and Future Projections of Regional Winds in the Iberian Peninsula: Cierzo, Levante and Poniente, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-509, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-509, 2024.

09:15–09:30
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EMS2024-715
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Onsite presentation
Dor Sandler, Hadas Saaroni, Baruch Ziv, Rotem Ton, and Nili Harnik

The projected drying of the Mediterranean basin is a robust signal of future climate change. Dynamically, this is manifested as a large anticyclonic anomaly covering the region, alongside a decrease in cyclonic activity. Various processes have been previously proposed as drivers of this trend, both thermodynamical (decreased land-sea temperature gradient) and dynamical (intermediate-scale stationary wave response, poleward shift of the jet stream). Several elements of the North Atlantic large-scale circulation are known to affect Mediterranean cyclonic activity (extratropical storms, jet stream position, weather regimes), individually and through mutual interactions. However, their contribution to the overall drying remains an open question.

In this work, we use the framework of Finite Amplitude Local Wave Activity (FALWA; Huang & Nakamura, 2016) to deconstruct the role of the North Atlantic circulation in the projected changes downstream. FALWA is a diagnostic that keeps track of the wave activity ”stored” within circulation undulations, relative to a zonalized flow. It obeys an exact conservation relation; thus, its local rate of change is either due to a flux convergence, or to non conservative source-sink terms. This allows for a closed mechanistic budget analysis of the response, differentiating between horizontal advection by the mean flow, barotropic and baroclinic processes, and diabatic forcing.

We analyse this budget in a 10 member CMIP6 ensemble and investigate the multi-model mean circulation response and ensemble spread over the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean basin. Preliminary results show a prominent baroclinic contribution over the eastern North Atlantic combined with enhanced advection of upper tropospheric potential vorticity towards Europe. Both elements imply that the shifting of the North Atlantic storm track plays a role in the projected drying trend of the Mediterranean.

How to cite: Sandler, D., Saaroni, H., Ziv, B., Ton, R., and Harnik, N.: A Local Wave Activity Interpretation of the Large Scale Drivers Behind the Projected Drying of the Mediterranean, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-715, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-715, 2024.

09:30–09:45
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EMS2024-679
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Onsite presentation
Carlos Calvo-Sancho, Ana Montoro-Mendoza, Mateusz Taszarek, Juan Jesús González-Alemán, Javier Díaz-Fernández, José Ignacio Farrán, Mariano Sastre, Daniel Santos-Muñoz, María Yolanda Luna, and María Luisa Martín

On August 30th, 2022, a giant hailstorm with hailstones reaching up to 12 cm occurred in the northeastern Spain. This Spanish giant hailstorm record event caused, in addition to the damage to roofs, cars, and croplands, 67 injuries and even one fatality. During the event, the weather pattern over Europe was a quasi-omega block in the Western Mediterranean with a narrow cut-off low over the center-eastern of France, inducing the development of a very short-wave trough in extreme northeastern Spain. Such setup, the typical summer thermal-low and very high Mediterranean SSTs, promoted vorticity advection and a high amount of moisture in low-levels.

In this study, the climate change effect in the hail-favorable environment, in which hailstone growth was promoted, is analyzed by applying the Pseudo-Global Warming Approach (PGWA). The PGWA is also applied to study the response to global warming during the last part of the 21st century to the giant hailstorm development. Three climatic models from the CMIP6 (EC-EARTH3, CESM-WACCM, and MRI-ESM2-0) and the PiClim, historical, and SSP5-8.5 scenarios are used to obtain the climate change increment [PRESENT - PiClim and FUTURE-PRESENT) needed in the PGWA. The increments are computed for all the prognostic variables and added to ERA5 to be used as initial/boundary conditions in the simulations obtained from the WRF-ARW model. A control simulation is performed using the ERA5 initial conditions without perturbation to compare it with the preindustrial-like and the future-like climates. 

The results in this first climate change attribution study to giant hailstorms indicate that the environment in a preindustrial-like climate would have been less conducive to convective hazards with a significant reduction in the studied thermodynamic parameters. The hailstorm event considering the preindustrial-like climate would have been less severe than the real event in the present climate. Considering a future-like climate, the results also indicate an enhancement in the thermodynamic variables. Large amounts of instability would be available in the scenario used, exceeding the values of the actual event. Although the hailstone diameter would not increase, the probability of very large hailstone events would increase by ~30%. Therefore, very large hail events would be more likely in hail-favorable supercells at the end of the century.

The use of the PGWA in high-impact severe weather events allows for a better understanding of how these events could change with global warming. This knowledge could help to improve the present early-warnings systems.  

How to cite: Calvo-Sancho, C., Montoro-Mendoza, A., Taszarek, M., González-Alemán, J. J., Díaz-Fernández, J., Farrán, J. I., Sastre, M., Santos-Muñoz, D., Luna, M. Y., and Martín, M. L.: Global Warming Influence on a Giant Hailstorm in Spain via the Pseudo-Global Warming Approach, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-679, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-679, 2024.

09:45–10:00
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EMS2024-613
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Onsite presentation
Diego Campos Díaz, Matias Olmo, Angel Muñoz, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, and Josep Cos

The observed warming in the Western Mediterranean (WM) region during the last decades is projected to continue and grow larger than the global mean, which is why it has been labeled as a climate change hotspot. Even within a relatively small region such as the WM, the combination of natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change can lead to a large spatial variety of extreme weather and climate events.

This study focuses on analysing temperature and precipitation in the WM region at different time scales, using a climate regionalization that considers the WM climatic heterogeneity, emphasising the detection of long-term trends and performing an initial attribution of their sources.

The regionalisation process involves the utilisation of monthly temperature and precipitation data from ERA5 during 1950-2020. The regionalisation starts with a pre-filtering of the data with empirical orthogonal functions. A non-hierarchical K-Means clustering was then conducted, followed by a sensitivity analysis to determine the optimal number of clusters, considering the internal representativeness of each group and the seasonal differences between groups. 

A time-scale decomposition was carried out to disentangle the contribution of different time scales to the regional temperature and precipitation time series of the regions identified. The non-linear, long-term trend component is obtained via regression of the regional temperature and precipitation series with the smoothed global mean-surface temperature anomaly, using the GISTEMPv4 database. The rationale is that precipitation and temperature change not only as a result of time but also due to global warming. To account for the monotonic time-related trend, a Mann-Kendall test is used for trend detection. The decadal "natural" component of the series is obtained as a residual from the trend and filtered using an order-two Butterworth filter with half-power at a period of 10 years. Finally, the interannual component of the series is obtained as a residual from the decadal part.

Finally, a preliminary attribution analysis was conducted using data from the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparison Project (DAMIP) climate simulations to disentangle the contributions of different external factors to the climate system in the observed long-term trends.

Results show that most of the variance in temperature series is explained by the long-term trend associated with climate change (~65%), while for the precipitation series, variance is dominated by interannual variability (~60%). These results vary seasonally and spatially throughout the year, with the highest warming trends observed in the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula and Africa in summer and the highest drying trends in the southwestern Mediterranean both in summer and winter. The net long-term warming observed in the series is mainly induced by the effect of greenhouse gases, while aerosols provide a smaller cooling effect. 

How to cite: Campos Díaz, D., Olmo, M., Muñoz, A., Doblas-Reyes, F., and Cos, J.: Disentangle the climate variability over the Western Mediterranean in the midst of climate change, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-613, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-613, 2024.

10:00–10:15
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EMS2024-173
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Onsite presentation
Pep Cos, Raül Marcos-Matamoros, Matías Olmo, Ángel G. Muñoz, Lluís Palma García, Diego Campos, and Francisco Doblas-Reyes

One of the critical mechanisms influencing extreme temperatures on a daily basis in the Mediterranean region, particularly during the summer months, involves the intrusion of Saharan or subtropical continental air masses. These warm and stable air masses, which move northward, significantly impact temperatures in the Mediterranean region and have been associated with severe heat waves. This phenomenon has not received extensive attention in the literature despite its impacts. Therefore, understanding these intrusions and the underlying mechanisms driving them is crucial, especially given the observed increase in the frequency of such events in recent decades (1991-2020) compared to the climatology of the latter part of the previous century (1961-1990).

 

In this study, we analyze air masses originating from low-latitude subtropical African desert areas during the historical period using data from the ERA5 observational dataset. We identify intrusion events in the western Mediterranean region through a study of air mass stability (geopotential thickness and vertical mean potential temperature), and we examine their frequency, spatial distribution, persistence, and trends over time. The impacts of these events extend beyond the region of the intrusion, leading to temperature anomalies across the Mediterranean basin and central Europe, indicating the non-local nature of the involved physical mechanisms.

 

Finally, we employ clustering techniques to gain insights into the large-scale weather types responsible for these intrusions and their geographical origins. Specifically, we utilise various applications of the k-means method, using diverse variables and sets of data. The results offer novel insight into the conditions that favour intrusions in different locations of the western Mediterranean, their temporal evolution and their relationship with well-studied teleconnection patterns. It also offers an unprecedented observational climatology to assess the ability of climate models to represent this phenomenon appropriately.

How to cite: Cos, P., Marcos-Matamoros, R., Olmo, M., G. Muñoz, Á., Palma García, L., Campos, D., and Doblas-Reyes, F.: Subtropical air intrusions in the Western Mediterranean: their impacts and associated atmospheric circulation, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-173, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-173, 2024.

10:15–10:30
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EMS2024-372
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Online presentation
Darío Redolat, Robert Monjo, and Emma Gaitán

It is widely understood from analyzing energy balances that the global oceans play a crucial role in shaping atmospheric seasonal variations through interconnected mechanisms. Despite advances, numerical weather prediction models still face significant challenges in accurately predicting long-term trends due to their nonlinear response to initial deep ocean conditions. Given the inherently erratic nature of the Mediterranean climate, we have formulated an alternative approach based on several underlying assumptions: (1) recognizing that delayed teleconnection patterns offer valuable insights into the complex interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, particularly on shorter timescales, (2) noting the presence of predictable cyclic oscillations, and (3) leveraging the discernible predictive signals by isolating them from the surrounding noise over a continuous time frame. To empirically test these theoretical underpinnings, we conducted an extensive analysis of the subseasonal predictability of temperature and precipitation at 11 reference points in the Mediterranean region spanning the period from 1993 to 2021. Our innovative method involves integrating lag-correlated teleconnections (comprising 15 indices) with self-predictive techniques for residual quasi-oscillations, utilizing both Wavelet (cyclic) and ARIMA (linear) analyses. The predictive performance of this Teleconnection-Wavelet-ARIMA (TeWA) method was cross-validated and benchmarked against the SEAS5-ECMWF model (3 months ahead). The results clearly demonstrate that the TeWA method significantly enhances the predictability of temperature and precipitation anomalies for the first month by an impressive margin of 50–70% compared to the SEAS5 forecast. Furthermore, on a daily moving-average basis, we identified optimal prediction windows of 30 days for temperature and 16 days for precipitation. Particularly, these predictable intervals exhibit strong alignment with atmospheric connections observed in teleconnection patterns (e.g., ULMO) and are further corroborated by spatial correlations with sea surface temperatures (SST). Finally, our findings underscore the potential of integrating the TeWA approach with existing numerical models to unlock new frontiers in subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting research.

How to cite: Redolat, D., Monjo, R., and Gaitán, E.: TeWA: A new approach to predict the seasonal and subseasonal anomalies, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-372, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-372, 2024.

Posters: Wed, 4 Sep, 18:00–19:30

Display time: Wed, 4 Sep 08:00–Thu, 5 Sep 13:00
Chairperson: Vicent Altava-Ortiz
EMS2024-505
Iliana Polychroni, Maria Hatzaki, and Panagiotis Nastos

According to the latest IPCC report (2023), the Mediterranean region faces already significant risks like heatwaves, water scarcity, droughts, coastal risks due to flooding, erosion, wildfires and human health due to climate change. Taking into consideration that the Mediterranean region experiences air temperature almost 1.5 ºC above the pre-industrial level, it is obvious that the temperature extremes are likely to continue to increase more than the global average and since the precipitation is decreasing, droughts will be more frequent and intense.

In this work, the spatial and temporal variability of four combined extreme climate indices over the Mediterranean region is investigated under the aspect of the upcoming climate change. More specifically, these combined extremes indices concern Cold/Dry (CD), Cold/Wet (CW), Warm/Dry (WD) and Warm/Wet (WW) days and they are defined by the exceedances of the joint modes of air temperature and precipitation using the 25th and 75th percentile levels (European Climate Assessment &Dataset, www.ecad.eu).

The data used for the calculations of the indices concern daily mean temperature and precipitation datasets from an ensemble of 8 regional climate models (RCMs) simulations for the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) with a spatial resolution of 0.11 degree (EUR-11, ~12.5km).  All the calculations and the visualizations of the maps have been conducted in R project.

These extreme indices were calculated seasonally and annually for the periods 2041-2060 (near future) and 2081-2100 (far future), with reference period 1981-2005 for the percentiles, under the RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios. In addition, seasonal and annual means and trends were estimated for each index for the near future and far future, under all the aforementioned emission scenarios. The findings revealed an increased frequency of WD days in almost all the Mediterranean region and high values of CD days in many areas, against few WW and CW days.

How to cite: Polychroni, I., Hatzaki, M., and Nastos, P.: Variability of combined extreme climate indices over the Mediterranean region under Different Emission Scenarios., EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-505, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-505, 2024.

EMS2024-422
Matias Olmo, Pep Cos, Vicent Altava-Ortiz, Antoni Barrera-Escoda, Diego Campos, Saskia Loosveldt-Tomas, Pierre-Antoine Bretonniere, Marc Prohom-Duran, Jordi Cunillera, Ángel Muñoz, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, and Albert Soret

There is a growing need to understand why the Euro-Mediterranean region and, especially Catalonia, are hotspot regions for both warming as well as drying signals in climate simulations and projections, particularly in summer. Local decision makers call for specific climate information requirements, highlighting the difficulty in having a large range of data sources –observations, global and regional projections, sensitivity and attribution experiments– which lead to discrepancies and analogies regarding the conclusions extracted from different climate data sources. 

In this context, CLIMCAT is a joint project between the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the Meteorological Service of Catalonia in which a variety of data-storing, evaluation and visualisation tools are employed to provide user-centred climate indices and filtered future projections. For the latter, a process-based evaluation framework based on atmospheric circulation patterns (CPs) is designed, focusing on capturing the synoptic configurations that dominate the Euro-Mediterranean region and their impacts in Catalonia. The hypothesis behind this research is that better-performing GCMs may present more plausible future simulations in a global warming scenario.

CPs are defined using daily mean sea-level pressure (SLP) by means of an Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) data reduction combined with Ward's hierarchical clustering. The ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis is considered as reference during 1950-2022 to evaluate a set of 24 global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 6 (CMIP6). The link between CPs and surface variables –precipitation, maximum and minimum temperatures– is analysed. Model performance is quantified through multiple spatial and temporal metrics, allowing the ranking of the best-performing GCMs. 

It is found that most of the GCMs are able to capture the annual cycle of the CPs frequency in their historical runs, with a dominant summer CP enhancing warm and dry conditions. However, the correct timing of this pattern and the transitional CPs (autumn and spring) are often misrepresented. The analysis of the surface patterns discriminated by CPs presents an overall good model performance, better for the temperatures than rainfall, particularly in the transition seasons, for which the GCMs spread in their skill score increases. 

Finally, when combining spatial and temporal skill metrics, we are able to identify the best-performing GCMs over the Euro-Mediterranean region, allowing a filtering of the large set of CMIP6 projections in different future scenarios. This is a flexible workflow that can be easily modified based on user needs, such as emphasising model capabilities in specific variables and/or atmospheric structures, depending on the regional and local needs to reduce model uncertainty. The approach is designed to support the provision of useful and robust climate information that can benefit policy making at a regional scale.

How to cite: Olmo, M., Cos, P., Altava-Ortiz, V., Barrera-Escoda, A., Campos, D., Loosveldt-Tomas, S., Bretonniere, P.-A., Prohom-Duran, M., Cunillera, J., Muñoz, Á., Doblas-Reyes, F., and Soret, A.: CLIMCAT: Plan for Comprehensive Climate Change Information for Catalonia. Process-based filtering of CMIP6 GCMs projections in the Euro-Mediterranean. , EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-422, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-422, 2024.

EMS2024-615
Rui Guo, Hung Nguyen, Stefano Galelli, Serena Ceola, and Alberto Montanari

Relatively short instrumental streamflow records in the European Alps limit our understanding of the long-term variability of streamflow, which could greatly impact freshwater resources management. To improve the accuracy of future scenarios for rare extreme events that recently impacted severely important water resource systems and communities at the global level, a better understanding of past climatological and hydrological information is essential. Tree-ring-based proxy data have proven to be a viable opportunity for reconstructing streamflow in different regions. Here, the station-based streamflow of six rivers originating from the European Alps are reconstructed dating back to the year 1100 by using a climate-informed framework. Additionally, we use paleo simulations and future projections from state-of-the-art CMIP6 and PMIP4 climate models to study past and future streamflow changes, including the characteristics of rare extreme events like multi-year droughts and floods. By integrating proxy-based reconstructions, climate model simulations and projections, and observations, the changes in streamflow and rare extreme events in the European Alps are put into a millennial perspective covering the past nine centuries and one century into the future. Our findings reveal that the observed worst annual streamflow deficit events are among the most severe in the past 900 years. In addition, climate models project a coherent decrease in streamflow for all the basins, which indicates an unprecedented drought condition in the future. Our framework offers a unique opportunity to assess the risk of extreme events for rivers in the European Alps, thus playing a crucial role in developing robust water management strategies for climate change adaptation.

How to cite: Guo, R., Nguyen, H., Galelli, S., Ceola, S., and Montanari, A.: Streamflow changes in the European Alps indicate increasing drought risk from past to future, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-615, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-615, 2024.

EMS2024-713
Sarah Ivusic, Ivan Güttler, and Kristian Horvath

The Adriatic region is one of the rainiest areas in Europe, particularly its coastal mountainous region. This area is often affected by severe weather events like heavy rainfall and flash floods, which pose a severe risk to people and property. Air-sea interactions play a significant role in this region, particularly in the autumn when heavy precipitation events (HPEs) are frequent, and the gradients are high between the sea-surface temperature (SST) and atmospheric temperature.

Atmosphere-only regional climate models (RCMs) are forced by SST as a lower boundary condition, which comes from reanalysis or global models. These models typically have a much lower resolution than the atmosphere-only RCM. On the other hand, regional atmosphere-ocean coupled models (RAOCMs) explicitly resolve air-sea interactions at high resolutions resulting in improved cyclogenesis and precipitation.

Our objective is to assess the impact of ocean-atmosphere coupling on heavy precipitation events that occurred during the first HyMeX Special Observation Period from 5 September to 6 November 2012. We focus on the six intensive observation periods (IOPs) during which heavy precipitation events affected the eastern Adriatic region. Additionally, we assess the performance of the coupled simulations in representing heavy and extreme precipitation at climatological scales.

To achieve this, we use the evaluation atmosphere-only RCMs and RAOCMs simulations from the Med-CORDEX framework. As a reference dataset, we use the precipitation analysis system MESCAN-SURFEX, available at 5.5 km resolution every 6 h, and the rain gauge data from the local observational networks. The main verification method for the HPEs is the quality object-based measure SAL which takes into account the structure (S), the amplitude (A), and the location (L) of the precipitation field. For the climatological scale, we focus on a range of heavy and extreme precipitation indices.

How to cite: Ivusic, S., Güttler, I., and Horvath, K.: The impact of ocean–atmosphere coupling on heavy precipitation events over eastern Adratic and Dinaric Alps, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-713, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-713, 2024.

EMS2024-1070
Nowf Maaith and Tania Sharmin

Abstract.

Background Context - Energy security remains a crucial barrier to achieving sustainable development in Jordan, particularly given the substantial energy demands of the residential sector. In this context, this study will focus on this issue by focusing on low-income housing, considering that it accounts for a substantial portion of the total housing demand in the nation at 44% and experiences high energy consumption due to inadequate environmental design [1], [2]. Low-income households continue to experience persistently high energy consumption rates, indicating significant challenges in improving buildings' energy efficiency due to insufficient knowledge, understanding, and evidence [3]. 

Purpose - This study will investigate the energy performance of low-income designs and their energy consumption pattern in the country's four primary climate zones, namely semi-arid Mediterranean, hot Sahara Mediterranean, warm Sahara Mediterranean, and cool arid Mediterranean.

Case Study – This study will focus on two predominant public low-income typologies, Type-I and Type-M, constructed by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDC). These typologies are applied throughout the whole country without consideration for their climatic contexts [4], leading to high heating and cooling demand.

Methodology - Using the ClimateStudio plug-in that integrates the EnergyPlus simulation algorithm in the Rhino-Grasshopper software as a primary simulation tool followed by a comparative analysis, allows for a comprehensive understanding of how the two low-income perform under the various climatic conditions present in the country.

Findings - The findings of this study will identify whether these current designs are more appropriate for the different climate zones of Jordan. This study is anticipated to provide evidence-based recommendations for the type of potential energy efficiency improvements that can be targeted at each climatic zone. In addition, it will be intended to guide the designers and decision-makers in promoting and developing energy-conscious housing solutions in low-income settings that align with each climatic zone, thereby mitigating the effect of the energy crisis on the national economy and enhancing sustainability.

Keywords: Building Performance, Energy-Efficiency, Low-Income Housing, Climate Zones.

 

References

[1]      M. Al-Homoud, S. Al-Oun, and A. M. Al-Hindawi, ‘The low-income housing market in Jordan’, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 233–252, Aug. 2009, doi: 10.1108/17538270910977536.

[2]      H. H. Ali and S. N. Alzu’bi, ‘Design optimization of sustainable affordable housing model in hot-arid climate-case of Jordan’, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 607–627, Nov. 2017, doi: 10.1108/IJHMA-01-2017-0009.

[3]      F. S. Hafez et al., ‘Energy Efficiency in Sustainable Buildings: A Systematic Review with Taxonomy, Challenges, Motivations, Methodological Aspects, Recommendations, and Pathways for Future Research’, Energy Strategy Reviews, vol. 45, p. 101013, Jan. 2023, doi: 10.1016/j.esr.2022.101013.

[4]      A. A. Al Haija, ‘Environmental and Social Issues in Jordanian Low-Income Housing Design’, Open House International, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 111–120, Dec. 2011, doi: 10.1108/OHI-04-2011-B0010.

How to cite: Maaith, N. and Sharmin, T.: Investigate the Impact of Climatic Conditions on the Building Energy Performance of Low-income Housing in Jordan, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-1070, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-1070, 2024.