CLIMATE PROJECTIONS FOR THE NORDIC CE PROJECT - AN ANALYSIS OF AN EXTENDED SET OF GLOBAL AND REGIONAL CLIMATE MODEL RUNS

The regional 'production' climate scenarios provided for the Nordic Project on Climate and Energy (CE) project were based on dynamical downscaling of two global climate models (GCMs), merely considering two SRES emission scenarios. To better meet the full uncertainty of future climate evolution, an extended set of climate projections was constructed. Mean temperature and precipitation projections were composed for two 30-year periods for seven regions covering Northern Europe and Greenland. Projections were formulated for the A1FI, A2, B2 and B1 scenarios, employing the super-ensemble pattern scaling method when a model response to some forcing scenario was not available. The median estimates based on projections by six GCMs or, alternatively, by ten regional climate models (RCMs) within the EU-funded PRUDENCE project, were almost invariably statistically significant for temperature change, but less frequently so for precipitation, especially in summer. In Greenland by 20702099, however, precipitation was projected to increase significantly in all seasons. The temperature changes in the CE 'production' climate simulations generally fell inside the 95% probability intervals of a Gaussian fit to the GCM-based projections. For Northern Europe, however, the HadAM3H-driven CE A2 runs produced weaker wintertime warming than the GCMs for the same forcing scenario. Compared with the GCM estimates, CE production scenarios were generally wetter in winter and drier in summer. Annual numbers of frost and snow cover days in northern Europe decreased by about 30%, in Baltic countries even more, but there was a large scatter among the projections by individual RCMs. One-day maximum precipitation tends to increase in most cases, even so in summer, when changes in mean precipitation are quite small - an indication of a more extreme summertime precipitation climate in the future.

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