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A new set of climate change scenarios for 2050 for the Netherlands was produced recently. The scenarios span a wide range of possible future climate conditions, and include climate variables that are of interest to a broad user community. The scenario values are constructed by combining output from an ensemble of recent General Climate Model (GCM) simulations, Regional Climate Model (RCM) output, meteorological observations and a touch of expert judgment. For temperature, precipitation, potential evaporation and wind four scenarios are constructed, encompassing ranges of both global mean temperature rise in 2050 and the strength of the response of the dominant atmospheric circulation in the area of interest to global warming. For this particular area, wintertime precipitation is seen to increase between 3.5 and 7% per degree global warming, but mean summertime precipitation shows opposite signs depending on the assumed response of the circulation regime. Annual maximum daily mean wind speed shows small changes compared to the observed (natural) variability of this variable. Sea level rise in the North Sea in 2100 ranges between 35 and 85 cm. Preliminary assessment of the impact of the new scenarios on water management and coastal defence policies indicate that particularly dry summer scenarios and increased intensity of extreme daily precipitation deserves additional attention in the near future.

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A method to prepare a set of four climate scenarios for the Netherlands is presented. These scenarios for climate change in 2050 and 2085 (compared to present-day) are intended for general use in climate change adaptation in the Netherlands. An ensemble of eight simulations with the global model EC-Earth and the regional climate model RACMO2 (run at 12 km resolution) is used. For each scenario time horizon, two target values of the global mean temperature rise are chosen based on the spread in the CMIP5 simulations. Next, the corresponding time periods in the EC-Earth/RACMO2 simulations are selected in which these target values of the global temperature rise are reached. The model output for these periods is then resampled using blocks of 5 yr periods. The rationale of resampling is that natural variations in the EC-Earth/RACMO2 ensemble are used to represent (part of the) uncertainty in the CMIP5 projections. Samples are then chosen with the aim of reconstructing the spread in seasonal temperature and precipitation changes in CMIP5 for the Netherlands. These selected samples form the basis of the scenarios. The resulting four scenarios represent 50-80% of the CMIP5 spread for summer and winter changes in seasonal means as well as a limited number of monthly statistics (warm, cold, wet and dry months). The strong point of the method-also in relation to the previous set of the climate scenarios for the Netherlands issued in 2006-is that it preserves nearly all physical inter-variable consistencies as they exist in the original model output in both space and time.

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