Sensitivity Study of Different RegCM4.4 Model Set-Ups – Recent Results from the TVRegCM Experiment

Abstract

The oncoming climate changes will exert influence on the ecosystems, on all branches of the international economy, and on the quality of life. Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are the most widespread and successful tools employed for both numerical weather forecast and climate research since the 1980s. However, growing demands on accurate and reliable information on regional and sub-regional scale are not directly met by relatively coarse resolution global models, mainly due to the excessive costs affiliated with the use of the model in very high resolution. Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are important instruments used for downscaling climate simulations from GCMs. Main aim of the numerical experiment Tuning an Validation of Regional Climate Model (RegCM-TVRegCM) is to quantify the impact of some tunable factors in the RegCM set-up on the model outputs. Thus, on the first stage of the study, the skill of 20 different model configurations in representing the basic spatial and temporal patterns of the Southeast European (SE) climate for the period 1999-2009, is evaluated. Based on these outcomes, the present work is dedicated on more detailed inspection of the model set-ups with recognizable better performance. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the time series of the temperature and precipitation of the 6 most promising model set-ups and the E-OBS on monthly basis are calculated. The main conclusion is that this test does not reveal single one model set-up that definitely over performs the other considered ones.

Keywords

• regional climate simulation
• regcm4.4
• sensitivity study
• high performance computing