Abstract
High resolution regional climate models are needed to understand how climate change will impact extreme precipitation. Current state-of-the-art climate models are Convection Permitting Models (CPMs) at kilometre scale grid-spacing. CPMs are often used together with convective parameterised Regional Climate Models (RCMs) due to high computational costs of CPMs. This study compares the representation of extreme precipitation events between a 12 km resolution RCM and a 2.2 km resolution CPM. Precipitation events are tracked in both models, and extreme events, identified by peak intensity, are analysed in a Northern European case area. Extreme event tracks show large differences in both location and movement patterns between the CPM and RCM. This indicates that different event types are sampled in the two models, with differences extending to much larger scales. We visualise event-development using area-intensity evolution diagrams. This reveals that for the 100 most extreme events, the RCM data is likely dominated by physically implausible events, so called ‘grid-point storms’, with unrealistically high intensities. For the 1000 and 10,000 most extreme events, intensities are higher for CPM events, while areas are larger for RCM extreme events. Sampling extreme events by season shows that differences between RCM and CPM in intensity and area in the top 100 extreme events are largest in autumn and winter, while for the top 1000 and top 10,000 events differences are largest in summer. Overall this study indicates that extreme precipitation projections from traditional coarse resolution RCMs need to be used with caution, due to the possible influence of grid-point storms.
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Availability of data and material
Model data are available upon request from the UK Met Office, which are used under licence and there are restrictions on their use. The Europe 2.2 km data is being analysed as part of the EUCP project, and use of these data must respect the work plans of the EUCP project partners.
Code availability
The data analysis was carried out using open-source software R and Python.
Notes
Unique days Top 1000: 483 (CPM2), 582 (RCM12). Unique days Top 10,000: 1678 (CPM2), 2107 (RCM12).
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Funding
Emma D. Thomassen received funding from the Danish State through the Danish Climate Atlas. Elizabeth Kendon gratefully acknowledges funding from the Joint UK BEIS/Defra Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101) and funding from the European Union under Horizon 2020 project European Climate Prediction System (EUCP; Grant agreement: 776613). Steven C. Chan gratefully acknowledges funding from United Kingdom NERC (FUTURE-STORMS; Grant: NE/R01079X/1) and European Research Council (INTENSE; Grant: ERC-2013-CoG-617329. Peter L. Langen’s contributions were funded by the Aarhus University Interdisciplinary Centre for Climate Change (iClimate). Ole B. Christensen’s contributions were partly funded by the Danish state through the National Centre for Climate Research (NCKF).
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Thomassen, E.D., Kendon, E.J., Sørup, H.J.D. et al. Differences in representation of extreme precipitation events in two high resolution models. Clim Dyn 57, 3029–3043 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05854-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05854-1