Downscaling Climate Simulations for Use in Hydrological Modeling of Medium-Sized River Catchments

To assess a possible future change in flood and drought risks for medium and small-scale river catchments, one needs to have data of a higher spatial and temporal resolution than what is provided by the global climate models. The COSMO-CLM regional climate model has to this purpose been used to downscale a set of global climate simulations to a 7 km horizontal resolution. In order to assess some of the uncertainties involved in near future scenario simulations, several different global simulations are downscaled to produce an ensemble of high resolution data. This will then be used as input to hydrological catchment models to assess future changes in flood risk for three catchments in Germany, within the CEDIM-project “Flood hazard in a changing climate” (Hochwassergefahr durch Klimawandel).