Regional climate models are used by a large number of groups, for more or less all regions of the world. Regional climate models are complementary to global climate models. A typical use of regional climate models is to add further detail to global climate analyses or simulations, or to study climate processes in more detail than global models allow. The relationship between global and regional climate models is much akin to that of global and regional weather forecasting models. Over the past 20 years, the development of regional climate models has led to increased resolution, longer model runs, and steps towards regional climate system models. During recent years, community efforts have started to emerge in earnest, which can be expected to further advance the state-of-the-art in regional climate modeling. Applications of regional climate models span both the past and possible future climates, facilitating climate impact studies, information and support to climate policy, and adaptation. 

This special issue of Climatic Change contains a series of research articles documenting coordinated work carried out within a 3-year European Union project 'Prediction of Regional scenarios and Uncertainties for Defining European Climate change risks and Effects' (PRUDENCE). The main objective of the PRUDENCE project was to provide high resolution climate change scenarios for Europe at the end of the twenty-first century by means of dynamical downscaling (regional climate modelling) of global climate simulations. The first part of the issue comprises seven overarching PRUDENCE papers on: (1) the design of the model simulations and analyses of climate model performance, (2 and 3) evaluation and intercomparison of simulated climate changes, (4 and 5) specialised analyses of impacts on water resources and on other sectors including agriculture, ecosystems, energy, and transport, (6) investigation of extreme weather events and (7) implications of the results for policy. A paper summarising the related MICE (Modelling the Impact of Climate Extremes) project is also included. The second part of the issue contains 12 articles that focus in more detail on some of the themes summarised in the overarching papers. The PRUDENCE results represent the first comprehensive, continental-scale intercomparison and evaluation of high resolution climate models and their applications, bringing together climate modelling, impact research and social sciences expertise on climate change.In Europe, as elsewhere in the world, there is a growing demand from decision-makers in the public and private sectors, from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), from researchers and from the general public for detailed information on future climate. Only

[1] The Global Land-Atmosphere Climate ExperimentCoupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (GLACE-CMIP5) is a multimodel experiment investigating the impact of soil moisture-climate feedbacks in CMIP5 projections. We present here first GLACE-CMIP5 results based on five Earth System Models, focusing on impacts of projected changes in regional soil moisture dryness (mostly increases) on late 21st century climate. Projected soil moisture changes substantially impact climate in several regions in both boreal and austral summer. Strong and consistent effects are found on temperature, especially for extremes (about 1-1.5 K for mean temperature and 2-2.5 K for extreme daytime temperature). In the Northern Hemisphere, effects on mean and heavy precipitation are also found in most models, but the results are less consistent than for temperature. A direct scaling between soil moistureinduced changes in evaporative cooling and resulting changes in temperature mean and extremes is found in the simulations. In the Mediterranean region, the projected soil moisture changes affect about 25% of the projected changes in extreme temperature. Citation: Seneviratne, S. I., et al.(2013), Impact of soil moisture-climate feedbacks on CMIP5 projections: First results from the GLACE-CMIP5 experiment, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40,[5212][5213][5214][5215][5216][5217]

An important new development within the European ENSEMBLES project has been to explore performance-based weighting of regional climate models (RCMs). Until now, although no weighting has been applied in multi-RCM analyses, one could claim that an assumption of 'equal weight' was implicitly adopted. At the same time, different RCMs generate different results, e.g. for various types of extremes, and these results need to be combined when using the full RCM ensemble. The process of constructing, assigning and combining metrics of model performance is not straightforward. Rather, there is a considerable degree of subjectivity both in the choice of metrics and on how these may be combined into weights. We explore the applicability of combining a set of 6 specifically designed RCM performance metrics to produce one aggregated model weight with the purpose of combining climate change information from the range of RCMs used within ENSEMBLES. These metrics capture aspects of model performance in reproducing large-scale circulation patterns, meso-scale signals, daily temperature and precipitation distributions and extremes, trends and the annual cycle. We examine different aggregation procedures that generate different inter-model spreads of weights. The use of model weights is sensitive to the aggregation procedure and shows different sensitivities to the selected metrics. Generally, however, we do not find compelling evidence of an improved description of mean climate states using performance-based weights in comparison to the use of equal weights. We suggest that model weighting adds another level of uncertainty to the generation of ensemble-based climate projections, which should be suitably explored, although our results indicate that this uncertainty remains relatively small for the weighting procedures examined.

The Swedish regional climate modelling programme, SWECLIM, started in 1997 with the main goal being to produce regional climate change scenarios over the Nordic area on a time scale of 50 to 100 yr. An additional goal is to produce water resources scenarios with a focus on hydropower production, dam safety, water supply and environmental aspects of water resources. The scenarios are produced by a combination of global climate models (GCMs), regional climate models and hydrological runoff models. The GCM simulations used thus far are 10 yr time slices from 2 different GCMs, UKMO HadCM2 from the Hadley Centre and the ECHAM4/OPYC3 of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. The regional climate model is a modified version of the international HIRLAM forecast model and the hydrological model is the HBV model developed at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute. Scenarios of river runoff have been simulated for 6 selected basins covering the major climate regions in Sweden. Changes in runoff totals, runoff regimes and extreme values have been analysed with a focus on the uncertainties introduced by the choice of GCM and routines for estimation of evapotranspiration in the hydrological model. It is further shown how these choices affect the statistical return periods of future extremes in a design situation.