Abstract
We present an analysis of extreme precipitation events in convection-resolving climate simulations. The simulations are performed with the COSMO-CLM model at 2.2 km resolution across an extended Alpine region and its larger-scale surrounding. Generalized extreme value theory (GEV) is applied to address projections of 5-day, daily and hourly extreme precipitation events in all seasons. Validation using ERA-Interim driven simulations reveals significant improvements with the 2.2 km resolution. In comparison to its driving 12 km model, high resolution improves the simulation of precipitation on most investigated timescales and seasons. The climate change signal is analyzed in 10-year long control and scenario simulations (1991–2000 and 2081–2090) driven by a CMIP5 coupled climate model (MPI-ESM-LR) under an RCP8.5 greenhouse gas scenario. Analysis shows negligible differences between the two resolutions for winter precipitation on all time scales, while in the other seasons the 2.2 km model shows smaller changes in extreme hourly precipitation, and yields narrower uncertainty estimates. Changes in extreme summer precipitation qualitatively scale with the Clausius–Clapeyron rate, i.e., 6–7% per degree warming, and are consistent with previous percentile based analysis. In winter, changes exceed the Clausius–Clapeyron rate. Some interpretations of this result are provided.
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Acknowledgements
Funding for this study was provided by the Swiss National Sciences Foundation through the Grant 200021_132614 and the Sinergia Grant CRSII2_154486 ‘crCLIM’. Juerg Schmidli was partly supported by the Hans Ertel Centre for Weather Research. The numerical simulations were conducted on the CRAY XE6 at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) in Lugano, with partial support from PRACE. The authors would like to thank MeteoSwiss, for providing us with observational data set (EURO4M-APGD and ANETZ data), and for the support in setting-up and running the simulations. Furthermore, we acknowledge the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF, Reading, UK) for providing access to ERA-Interim reanalysis and Max-Planck Institute (Hamburg) for providing boundary data from the global climate model MPI-ESM-LR. The extreme value analysis has been done using an R package “gevXgpd” provided by Christoph Frei. The authors would also like to thank Dani Lüthi (ETH Zürich) and Lukas Egloff for input and useful comments.
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This paper is a contribution to the special issue on Advances in Convection-Permitting Climate Modeling, consisting of papers that focus on the evaluation, climate change assessment, and feedback processes in kilometer-scale simulations and observations. The special issue is coordinated by Christopher L. Castro, Justin R. Minder, and Andreas F. Prein.
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Ban, N., Rajczak, J., Schmidli, J. et al. Analysis of Alpine precipitation extremes using generalized extreme value theory in convection-resolving climate simulations. Clim Dyn 55, 61–75 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4339-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4339-4