Usefulness of AEMET generated climate projections for climate change impact studies on floods at national-scale (Spain)

Abstract

The preliminary assessment of flood risk should take into account the effect of climate change on flood hazards, according to the EU Floods Directive. Some climatic variables supplied by a set of global climate models have been regionalized by the Spanish Meteorological Agency (Agencia Estatal de Meteorología, AEMET) in Spain, by using two statistical downscaling methods. The usefulness of this regionalization can be assessed by their fitting to the observed data in the control period (1961-2000). A comparison based on a set of statistics has been conducted. Results show that although the fit is good for annual mean values, annual maximum values for both regionalization are not adequately simulated by AEMET models, since they provide lower extremes with a smaller variability. In addition, a great uncertainty in the characterization of these extremes values, in comparison with the observations, is observed.

Keywords

• cambio climático
• modelos climáticos globales
• downscaling estadístico
• precipitación
• España