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Ability of an ensemble of regional climate models to reproduce weather regimes over Europe-Atlantic during the period 1961–2000

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Abstract

One of the main concerns in regional climate modeling is to which extent limited-area regional climate models (RCM) reproduce the large-scale atmospheric conditions of their driving general circulation model (GCM). In this work we investigate the ability of a multi-model ensemble of regional climate simulations to reproduce the large-scale weather regimes of the driving conditions. The ensemble consists of a set of 13 RCMs on a European domain, driven at their lateral boundaries by the ERA40 reanalysis for the time period 1961–2000. Two sets of experiments have been completed with horizontal resolutions of 50 and 25 km, respectively. The spectral nudging technique has been applied to one of the models within the ensemble. The RCMs reproduce the weather regimes behavior in terms of composite pattern, mean frequency of occurrence and persistence reasonably well. The models also simulate well the long-term trends and the inter-annual variability of the frequency of occurrence. However, there is a non-negligible spread among the models which is stronger in summer than in winter. This spread is due to two reasons: (1) we are dealing with different models and (2) each RCM produces an internal variability. As far as the day-to-day weather regime history is concerned, the ensemble shows large discrepancies. At daily time scale, the model spread has also a seasonal dependence, being stronger in summer than in winter. Results also show that the spectral nudging technique improves the model performance in reproducing the large-scale of the driving field. In addition, the impact of increasing the number of grid points has been addressed by comparing the 25 and 50 km experiments. We show that the horizontal resolution does not affect significantly the model performance for large-scale circulation.

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Acknowledgments

The financial support of this work has been provided by the European Union Sixth Framework programme project ENSEMBLES, under contract GOCE-CT-2006-037005. The authors wish to thank Alain Braun (CNRM), A. Farda and P. Stepanek (CHMI), O.B. Christensen (DMI), C. Schär (ETHZ), B. Rockel (GKSS), E. Buonomo (METO-HC), F. Giorgi (ICTP), E. van Meijgaard (KNMI), J.E. Haugen (METNO), D. Jacob (MPI), M. Rummukainen (SMHI), E. Sanchez (UCLM) and D. Paquin (OURANOS) for performing the RCMs experiments and providing the model outputs. Special thank are also given to L. Terray, F. Doblas-Reyes and P. Lucas-Picher for their useful comments on the weather regimes analysis and internal variability diagnostics. We would like to acknowledge J.H. Christensen for coordinating the RT3 activities and O.B. Christensen (DMI) for preparing and maintaining the website from the RT3 database. The ENSEMBLES data used in this work was funded by the EU FP6 Integrated Project ENSEMBLES (Contract number 505539) whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. 42 Av. G. Coriolis, 31057, Toulouse Cedex, France

    Emilia Sanchez-Gomez

  2. Météo-France CNRM/GMGEC CNRS/GAME, Toulouse, France

    S. Somot & M. Déqué

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  1. Emilia Sanchez-Gomez
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  2. S. Somot
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Correspondence to Emilia Sanchez-Gomez.

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Sanchez-Gomez, E., Somot, S. & Déqué, M. Ability of an ensemble of regional climate models to reproduce weather regimes over Europe-Atlantic during the period 1961–2000. Clim Dyn 33, 723–736 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-008-0502-7

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