Climatology of selected convective parameters over Europe in the light of CORDEX simulations

Adapting to climate change is already essential in the near future, thus necessitating a good understanding of expected changes by relevant sectors. For instance, severe thunderstorms pose significant economic risks and threats to human life as well as to critical infrastructure, but their detailed analysis is still quite challenging. Recent advancements in climate models have improved spatial resolution, enabling explicit descriptions of thunderstorm formation and development. However, the number of such high-resolution simulations remains limited. To overcome the resolution limitations, several convective parameters (e.g. convective available potential energy, convective inhibition, bulk wind shear, lapse rate, precipitable water, thunderstorm intensity parameter) are commonly used in weather forecasts and hazard warnings to characterize hazardous weather conditions, but their application on a climate scale is hindered by substantial storage and computational demands.

Within the CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment) framework, model simulation results are available for the entire European region at a fine resolution of 10 km. The aim of our research is to create the climatology of convective parameters based on an ensemble of regional climate models (RCMs), which can be used to explore changes in convective hazards due to climate change over the century. The study starts with the ERA5 reanalysis, from which we determine whether any trend can be detected in the different European subregions. Also, the RCMs have to be validated for the past from the convective processes’ point of view. Then, the future changes and trends are calculated for the available scenarios until the end of the 21st century.

Acknowledgements. This work has been implemented by the National Multidisciplinary Laboratory for Climate Change (RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00014) project within the framework of Hungary's National Recovery and Resilience Plan supported by the Recovery and Resilience Facility of the European Union. We acknowledge the Digital Government Development and Project Management Ltd. for awarding us access to the Komondor HPC facility based in Hungary. In addition, this study has been supported by the European Climate Fund (G-2409-68866).