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A new methodology for climate model selection and application to temperature of Europe

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Abstract

The accuracy of the climate impact models depends on the representative power of the climate model used in the analysis. Many problems in these impact models can be eliminated by the selection of the appropriate climate models as an input. The main purpose of this research is to find a methodology to select the more representative climate models. In recent years, the quantity and quality of climate models have significantly improved. In several projects, many different Global Climate Model (GCM)–Regional Climate Model (GCM) combinations have been carried out. One of these recent comprehensive projects is CORDEX. The monthly temperature outputs of various GCM-RCM combinations over Europe between the years 1976 and 2005 were used in this paper for the determination of the more representative combinations. E-OBS is used as the observation data set in this research. Using the proposed method, a clear difference between the more, moderately, and less representative model combinations could be obtained. To model the future temperature climatology of Europe, the best choice of the analysis method is using MPI as GCM and either REMO or CCLM5 as RCM over the whole domain. According to our analysis, the best representative climate model combination can be performed by running MPI-CCLM5 combination over the EURO-CORDEX domain.

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All data published in this article are available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

“We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’'s Working Group on Regional Climate, and the Working Group on Coupled Modelling, former coordinating body of CORDEX, and responsible panel for CMIP5. We also thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. We also acknowledge the Earth System Grid Federation infrastructure, an international effort led by the U.S. Department of Energy’'s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, the European Network for Earth System Modelling, and other partners in the Global Organisation for Earth System Science Portals (GO-ESSP).

Code availability

Most evaluations have been carried out by CDO, NCL and R-cran programs, which are available upon request from the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Physics, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Hamza Altinsoy & Levent Kurnaz

  2. Center for Climate Change and Policy Studies, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Levent Kurnaz

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  1. Hamza Altinsoy
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  2. Levent Kurnaz
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Correspondence to Hamza Altinsoy.

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Altinsoy, H., Kurnaz, L. A new methodology for climate model selection and application to temperature of Europe. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 95–107 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03622-z

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