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Dynamic downscaling of global climate projections for Eastern Europe with a horizontal resolution of 7 km

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Abstract

Climate change is one of the key factors influencing the quantity and quality of water resources in hydrologically sensitive regions. In order to downscale global climate simulations from horizontal resolutions of about 125–200 km to about 7 km, a double nesting strategy was chosen. The modelling approach was implemented with the Regional Climate Model CCLM (COSMO-Climate Local Model) with a first nesting covering a central part of Europe and with a second nesting covering parts of Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. A control run—driven by global reanalysis data—was evaluated by comparing the model results with corresponding reference data. Long-term yearly and monthly mean differences of temperature and precipitation were statistically assessed. As reference data for the first nesting, the gridded CRU data set with a horizontal resolution of about 55 km was used. Station data of the NOAA and ECA databases were interpolated to provide an appropriate reference data set for the second nesting. Both nestings overestimated long-term yearly precipitation means. Seasonal evaluation of the first nesting showed positive precipitation biases for spring and winter months and negative biases in summer. Furthermore, differences in the spatial precipitation patterns occured, especially in the high mountain area of the Carpathians. The second nesting overestimated precipitation in spring and summer with smaller biases than in the first nesting. Long-term area means of temperature were properly reproduced. The first nesting showed an overestimation for all months with maximal deviations in summer and spring. In contrast, the second nesting was slightly too warm for summer and autumn and too cold for winter and spring.

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Notes

  1. ERA40—ECMWF Re-Analysis Project 40, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Shinfield Park, Reading RG2 9AX0, UK.

  2. CRU—Climate Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences Faculty of Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.

  3. NOAA—National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1401 Constitution Avenue, NW Room 5123, Washington DC 20230, USA.

  4. ECA&D—European Climate Assessment & Dataset project, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), P.O. Box 201, 3730 AE De Bilt, The Netherlands.

  5. parallel data set means data from another database of the same station (NOAA or ECA&D database).

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by funding from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the project “IWAS—International Water Research Alliance Saxony” (grant 02WM1028). The authors would like to thank the Centre for Information Services and High Performance Computing in Dresden (ZIH) for providing the high performance computer resources and for support, the German High Performance Computing Centre for Climate and Earth System Research (DKRZ) for providing the ERA40 data set, the State Environment Agency Rheinland–Pfalz, Germany, for providing the software package InterMet and the CLM-Community for providing access to and support for the CCLM as well as for scientific discussions and valuable advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology, Chair of Meteorology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Dirk Pavlik, Dennis Söhl, Thomas Pluntke & Christian Bernhofer

  2. Department of Applied Geography and Cartography, Ivan Franko National University, Lviv, Ukraine

    Andriy Mykhnovych

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  1. Dirk Pavlik
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  2. Dennis Söhl
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  4. Andriy Mykhnovych
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Correspondence to Dirk Pavlik.

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Pavlik, D., Söhl, D., Pluntke, T. et al. Dynamic downscaling of global climate projections for Eastern Europe with a horizontal resolution of 7 km. Environ Earth Sci 65, 1475–1482 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-011-1081-1

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