A Sensitivity Study of High-Resolution Climate Simulations for Greece

Abstract

In the present study, the ability of the Advanced Weather Research and Forecasting numerical model (WRF-ARW) to perform climate regionalization studies in the topographically complex region of Greece, was examined in order to explore the possibility of a more reliable selection of physical schemes for the simulation of historical and future high resolution (5 km) climate model experiments to investigate the impact of climate change. This work is directly linked to a previous study investigating the performance of seven different model setups for one year, from which the need was derived for further examination of four different simulations to investigate the model sensitivity on the representation of surface variables statistics during a 5-year period. The results have been compared with observational data for maximum and minimum air temperature and daily precipitation through statistical analysis. Clear similarities were found in precipitation patterns among simulations and observations, yielding smoothly its inter-annual variability, especially during the wettest months and summer periods, with the lowest positive percentage BIAS calculated at about 19% for the selected combination of physics parameterizations (PP3). Regarding the maximum and minimum temperature, statistical analysis showed a high correlation above 0.9, and negative bias around 1−1.5 °C, and positive bias near 2 °C, respectively.

Keywords

• dynamical downscaling
• high resolution
• wrf
• greece
• temperature
• precipitation