Coordinated Projects
Our group has a long tradition in participating in joint efforts to produce regional climate simulations to be part of coordinated downscaling model ensembles (e.g. external pagePRUDENCEcall_made, external pageENSEMBLEScall_made and external pageEURO-CORDEXcall_made. These model ensembles give robust information about future projections and associated uncertainty, and the simulations are typically used by the climate impact community (see e.g. external pageCH2018call_made). Currently we are part of several coordinated projects; PRINCIPLES (a follow-up to EURO-CORDEX), CORDEX-FPS, and EUCP.
The international external pageCORDEXcall_made initiative aims to develop a climate downscaling framework in order to provide high-resolution regional climate change information. We have contributed to the EURO-CORDEX initiative with several simulations on 12 and 50 km horizontal resolution together with the CLM-Community. How well the RCM performs depends on the driving lateral boundary conditions (e.g global climate model (GCM) or reanalysis) as well as the models representations of the different processes. In a first evaluation study Kotlarski et al. (2014) could show that the EURO-CORDEX Ensemble driven by the reanalysis data ERA-INTERIM can capture the basic mean European climate and its variability in space and time (Fig. 2 - use the figure that is now under EURO-CORDEX on the web).
Currently, we are together with the CLM-Community participating in the CORDEX-CORE initiative, which aims to provide a core set of comprehensive and homogeneous projections across almost all CORDEX external pagedomainscall_made. The climate projections will build the base for future climate impact studies world wide and serve as a solid base for the next IPCC - report (external pageIPCC AR6 WGIIcall_made)
Our group is together with 8 other regional climate modeling institutions in Europe, participating in a new coordinated project: Producing RegIoNal ClImate Projections Leading to European Services (PRINCIPLES). PRINCIPLES is focusing on producing well-coordinated simulations for the EURO-CORDEX domain at high horizontal resolution, i.e. 0.11° (c. 12.5 km grid spacing) covering the full period 1961-2100. The coordination will focus on filling the 3D matric (GCMs x RCMs x RCPs) in a best way to capture the model uncertainty, scenario uncertainty and internal uncertainty. The simulations will be part of the C3S Climate Data Store (external pageCDScall_made). We are contributing with the GPU-version of the COSMO model (COSMSO-crCLIM), and the project started in spring 2017, and is going on until 2021.
The CORDEX external pageFlagship Pilot Studycall_made on Convective Phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean aims to produce and investigate a first-of-its-kind ensemble of convection-resolving simulations. The main aim of the project is to study convective precipitation events and their evolution under human induced climate change. Our group, together with other 16 modeling groups, is contributing to the project with the production of climate change simulations at convection-resolving scales. More details can be found in a recently published paper by Coppola et al. (2018).
The overarching objective of the European Climate Prediction System (external pageEUCPcall_made) is to develop an innovative European regional ensemble climate prediction system based on a new generation of improved and higher-resolution climate models, covering timescales from seasons to decades initialized with observations, and designed to support practical and strategic climate adaptation and mitigation decision-taking on local, national and global scales.
Our group is participating in the Working Package 3: “Demonstrator of high impact weather in a changing climate”, where together with other groups we perform continuous decadal-scale simulations over a few key regions of Europe.
Kotlarski, S., Keuler, K., Christensen, O. B., Colette, A., Déqué, M., Gobiet, A., Goergen, K., Jacob, D., Lüthi, D., van Meijgaard, E., Nikulin, G., Schär, C., Teichmann, C., Vautard, R., Warrach-Sagi, K., and Wulfmeyer, V.: Regional climate modeling on European scales: a joint standard evaluation of the EURO-CORDEX RCM ensemble, Geosci. Model Dev., 7, 1297-1333, 2014, external pagehttps://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-7-1297-2014call_made.
Coppola, E., Sobolowski, S., Pichelli, E. et al., A first-of-its-kind multi-model convection permitting ensemble for investigating convective phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean, Clim Dyn (2018), external pagehttps://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4521-8call_made.