Monday, 15 January 2007
Regional climate change expected in Eastern/Central Europe
Exhibit Hall C (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
The IPCC TAR suggests that Central European countries could become highly vulnerable to global warming. However, the results from coarse resolution global climate models (GCM) can only be considered as a first-guess of regional climate change consequences of global warming. We accomplished detailed comparison of several GCM outputs for the Central/Eastern European region using the MAGICC/SCENGEN package, which is based on an upwelling diffusion energy balance model (developed by Wigley et al. at NCAR). The four main IPCC SRES emission scenarios are compared in order to project climate conditions (including daily mean, maximum, and minimum temperature, and daily precipitation amount) for the 21st century. Regional climate models (RCM) nested in GCMs may lead to better estimations of future climate conditions in the European subregions since the horizontal resolution of these RCMs is much finer than the GCMs. In this paper, the potential use of two different RCMs (adapted at the Department of Meteorology, Eötvös Loránd University) are discussed: (1) model PRECIS developed at the UK Met Office, Hadley Centre with 25 km horizontal resolution and 19 vertical levels, (2) model RegCM3 developed by Giorgi et al. in ICTP - we are planning to run it with both 25 km and 10 km horizontal resolution. Both RCMs are 3-dimensional, sigma-coordinate, primitive equation models. Our analyses cover the entire Central/Eastern European region with special focus on the Carpathian Basin and Hungary. On the base of test runs, temperature and precipitation results are discussed.
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