Evaluation of stratospheric temperature climatology over Turkey using CMIP5 simulations

Trend analyses of stratospheric temperature show contradictory results, which might be related with the differences between earlier and new satellite datasets or climate model performances, or both (Thompson et al., 2012). In order to contribute to this new debate, the climatology of temperature in the upper atmosphere from 15 to 50km, is analyzed regionally namely for Turkey (26°E-45°E; 36°N-42°N) during the observed period 1979 to 2005. The Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) dataset is used to compare satellite observational data to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) climate model data for the years between 1998 and 2005. Additionally the future scenarios of total ozone climatology when carbon dioxide (CO2) remain the same and when it is doubled are examined by using CMIP5 projections focusing on the years 2012 to 2112. The period between the years 1979 and 2005 has been chosen as the control run. Thus, the main aim of the presented study is to investigate the interannual changes and the trend in stratospheric temperature using CMIP5 simulations and to point out the nature of CMIP5 dataset on local scales. For this purpose, we also compare our results with the reanalysis data set of ERA-Interim provided by ECMWF by means of a root mean square error analysis. This study will help us to improve our understanding of past and the future of stratospheric temperature trends as well as their extremes and to test the temperature dependent local climate simulations of CMIP5 models. Preliminary results are going to be discussed focusing on the uncertainties of satellite observations and climate models as suggested by (Thompson et al., 2012).