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The climate change response of alpine-mediterranean heavy precipitation events

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Abstract

The present study analyses the climate change response of Alpine-Mediterranean heavy precipitation events (HPEs), often associated with hazardous flooding. We investigate HPE properties describing their propagation, scale and intensity, by applying a storm tracking algorithm in an ensemble of convection permitting regional climate models (cpRCMs) under the CMIP5-RCP85 forcing scenario. The climate change response of HPE properties we derive by comparing their mean values for periods nearfuture [2040, 2050] and farfuture [2090, 2100] against those of a present-day period historical [1996, 2005]. By the end of the 21st century the model ensemble projects the region’s surface temperatures to increase by 4.0 \(^{\circ }\)C. In this warmer climate HPEs are found to propagate farther and faster. They last longer by 5%, their area increases by 15% and their precipitation volume by 35%. Their maximum precipitation rate increases by 13% and an estimate of severity is found increased by 20%. By differentiating specific HPE categories, regions and seasons we find that landfalling and orographically forced HPEs occurring in fall are most intense, heavy and severe. Most importantly we find that these events are also projected to respond most strongly to climate warming, meaning that they will be even more intense, heavy and severe. Consequently in Mediterranean regions the most dramatic changes must be expected, in particular in Southern Italy. But also in regions north of the Alps, where HPEs are generally weaker than to the south, HPEs are found to occur twice as often in wintertime accompanied with an increase in precipitation volume of about 50%. Our analysis also confirms that even though the Mediterranean climate is generally drier by the year 2100, precipitation amounts associated with HPEs are found to increase by 52%. Further HPEs are projected to be 12% more frequent overall, although their occurrence frequency decreases in summer. Eventually we show that the characteristic HPE properties scale with surface warming, meaning that the warmer the local climate is, the more frequent, intense, heavy and severe are HPEs. Notably statistical tests show that the ten-member cpRCM ensemble provides robust climate change responses of all HPE properties investigated. The projected changes of HPE properties infer an increase of flooding risk for communities of the Alpine-Mediterranean area and thus the results presented here may encourage local authorities in adapting their flood protection measurements to climate change.

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Data Availability

The tracker analysis output was made publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6972637. MTD is freely available at https://dtcenter.org/community-code/model-evaluation-tools-met. The observational datasets are available upon request through the institutions listed above.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the WCRP-CORDEX-FPS on Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean [FPSCONV-ALP-3] and the research data exchange infrastructure and services provided by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany, as part of the Helmholtz Data Federation initiative. This work has also been supported in part by the Horizon 2020 EUCP (European Climate Prediction System, https://www.eucp-project.eu) project. This EUCP project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 776613. The authors thank Meteo-France for providing the COMEPHORE dataset, MeteoSwiss for the RdisaggH dataset and DWD for providing the RADKLIM dataset (RADKLIM Version 2017.002: Reprocessed gauge-adjusted radar data, one-hour precipitation sums (RW) DOI: 10.5676/DWD/RADKLIM_RW_V2017.002). The authors acknowledge the CETEMPS, University of L’Aquila, for allowing ICTP to access the Italian database of precipitation which GRIPHO is based on. MED acknowledges the Partnership for advanced computing in Europe (PRACE) for awarding access to Piz Daint at ETH Zürich at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS, Switzerland). MED also acknowledges the Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss), CSCS, the Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) and ETH Zürich for their contributions to the development and maintenance of the GPU-accelerated version of COSMO.

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  1. Sebastian K. Müller

    Present address: University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICTP, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy

    Sebastian K. Müller, Emanuela Pichelli & Erika Coppola

  2. MOHC, Met Office Hadley Centre, Oxford, UK

    Segolene Berthou

  3. DWD, Deutscher Wetterdienst, Offenbach, Germany

    Susanne Brienen

  4. CNRM, Université de Toulouse, Météo-France, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Cécile Caillaud

  5. ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Marie-Estelle Demory

  6. MET, Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway

    Andreas Dobler

  7. Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research - Troposphere Research (IMK-TRO), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Hendrik Feldmann

  8. CMCC, Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Lecce, Italy

    Paola Mercogliano

  9. Kassel Institute of Sustainability, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Merja Tölle

  10. KNMI, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands

    Hylke de Vries

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Contributions

SKM developed and conducted the analysis, produced figures and wrote the manuscript. EC and EP supported the study in its conceptualization, methodology development, validation discussion and writing. EP, EC, SB, AD, BS, MT and HdV reviewed the manuscript. All authors, except of SKM and EC, are recognized for providing model output.

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Müller, S.K., Pichelli, E., Coppola, E. et al. The climate change response of alpine-mediterranean heavy precipitation events. Clim Dyn 62, 165–186 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06901-9

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