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Temperature scenarios for Norway: from regional to local scale

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Abstract

Scenarios with daily time resolution are frequently used in research on the impacts of climate change. These are traditionally developed by regional climate models (RCMs). The spatial resolution, however, is usually too coarse for local climate change analysis, especially in regions with complex topography, such as Norway. The RCM used, HIRHAM, is run with lateral boundary forcing provided from two global medium resolution models; the ECHAM4/OPYC3 from MPI and the HadAM3H from the Hadley centre. The first is run with IPCC SRES emission scenario B2, the latter is run with IPCC SRES emission scenarios A2 and B2. All three scenarios represent the future time period 2071–2100. Both models have a control run, representing the present climate (1961–1990). Daily temperature scenarios are interpolated from HIRHAM to Norwegian temperature stations. The at-site HIRHAM-temperatures, both for the control and scenario runs, are adjusted to be locally representative. Mean monthly values and standard deviations based on daily values of the adjusted HIRHAM-temperatures, as well as the cumulative distribution curve of daily seasonal temperatures, are conclusive with observations for the control period. Residual kriging are used on the adjusted daily HIRHAM-temperatures to obtain high spatial temperature scenarios. Mean seasonal temperature grids are obtained. By adjusting the control runs and scenarios and improving the spatial resolution of the scenarios, the absolute temperature values are representative at a local scale. The scenarios indicate larger warming in winter than in summer in the Scandinavian regions. A marked west–east and south–north gradient is projected for Norway, where the largest increase is in eastern and northern regions. The temperature of the coldest winter days is projected to increase more than the warmer temperatures.

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Acknowledgments

The present paper is a product of the project `Regional Climate Development Under Global Warming´ (RegClim), which is supported by the Research Council of Norway (Contract no. 155976/720). The Hadley Centre, the PRUDENCE project at the Danish Climate Centre and the staff at MPI (Dr. Daniela Jacob) is gratefully acknowledged for support of the global data. The geostatistical software used in the present paper is the geoR package developed by Ribeiro and Diggle (2001). The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

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  1. Norwegian Meteorological Institute, P.O. Box 43, Blindern, 0313, Oslo, Norway

    Torill Engen-Skaugen, Jan Erik Haugen & Ole Einar Tveito

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  1. Torill Engen-Skaugen
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  2. Jan Erik Haugen
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  3. Ole Einar Tveito
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Correspondence to Torill Engen-Skaugen.

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Engen-Skaugen, T., Haugen, J.E. & Tveito, O.E. Temperature scenarios for Norway: from regional to local scale. Clim Dyn 29, 441–453 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-007-0241-1

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