An ensemble of regional climate simulations from the Coordinated Regional Down-scaling Experiment in East Asia (CORDEX-East Asia) was analysed to evaluate the ability of 5 regional climate models (RCMs) and their ensemble mean in reproducing the key features of present day precipitation (1989−2008). We emphasised (1) an extreme rainfall event, (2) seasonal cli-matology, (3) annual cycles and inter-annual variability and (4) the monsoon characteristics. We highlighted 4 sub-monsoon regions, viz. South Asian Summer Monsoon (SAS), the East Asian Summer Monsoon (EAS), the Western North Pacific Tropical Monsoon (WNP) and the Australian-Maritime Continent Monsoon (AUSMC). We found that the RCMs showed a reasonable performance to capture the extreme rainfall event in 1998. The RCMs simulated the seasonal mean, annual cycle and inter-annual variability acceptably. However, individual models exhibited significant biases in some sub-regions and seasons. Moreover, most of the RCMs significantly improved their performance in capturing precipitation climatology and monsoon characteristics over the Korean Peninsula, the Korea Strait and southern Japan. Based upon this performance study, we conclude that the present set of RCMs from CORDEX can be used to provide useful information on climate projections over East Asia.

Around 70 Mha of land cover changes (LCCs) occurred in Europe from 1992 to 2015. Despite LCCs being an important driver of regional climate variations, their temperature effects at a continental scale have not yet been assessed. Here, we integrate maps of historical LCCs with a regional climate model to investigate air temperature and humidity effects. We find an average temperature change of −0.12 ± 0.20°C, with widespread cooling (up to −1.0°C) in western and central Europe in summer and spring. At continental scale, the mean cooling is mainly correlated with agriculture abandonment (cropland-to-forest transitions), but a new approach based on ridge-regression decomposing the temperature change to the individual land transitions shows opposite responses to cropland losses and gains between western and eastern Europe. Effects of historical LCCs on European climate are non-negligible and regionspecific, and ignoring land-climate biophysical interactions may lead to sub-optimal climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.

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This is a pre-submission, non-peer reviewed, preprint for self-archiving in EarthArXiv. The revised version of this manuscript has been provisionally accepted for publication by the scientific journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (https://www.esa.org/frontiers-in-ecology-and-the-environment/), and it is currently In press. Once published by the journal, the link to the publication will be made available here. The final published version of the paper might have slightly different content than the present version.