Recurrence Spectra of European Temperature in Historical Climate Simulations

Abstract

We analyse and quantify the recurrences of European temperature extremes using 32 historical simulations (1900–1999) of the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) and 8 historical simulations (1971–2005) from the EUROCORDEX experiment. We compare the former simulations to the 20th Century Reanalysis (20CRv2c) dataset to compute recurrence spectra of temperature in Europe. We find that, (1) the spectra obtained by the model ensemble mean are generally consistent with those of 20CR; (2) spectra biases have a strong regional dependence; (3) the resolution does not change the order of magnitude of spectral biases between models and reanalysis, (4) the spread in recurrence biases is larger for cold extremes. Our analysis of biases provides a new way of selecting a subset of the CMIP5 ensemble to obtain an optimal estimate of temperature recurrences for a range of time-scales.

Extreme value distributions of observation recurrences

“…. All these measures are exact dimensional and the information dimension of µ (2) is D 1 = 2 log 2 log 3 ≈ 1.26. The spectral approach to EVT used in section 2, applies to this systems, see [26] and [36].…”

“…We now take f (x, y) = x and look at the strip Σ ε = {|x − c| ≤ ε}, where c is chosen on a typical line (c, y). Instead of disintegrating, we can now use Fubini's theorem since µ (2) is a product measure. We have…”

“…and therefore the numerator in q k,n is bounded from above by 1 4a 2 (Leb(B n,z )) 2 . We now rewrite the denominator as 1 2a…”

“…In our case, we can do it directly since the map is easy enough. If we set P the Perron-Frobenius operator associated to T and we define the perturbed operator P 0 as P 0 (g) = P (g1 H c ), where g is a function of bounded variation, we check easily that, having set α = 2 3 : P 0 h 0 = αh 0 (52)…”

Weather and Climate Extremes: Current Developments

“…Regarding statistical methods for climate extremes, Molina-Aguilar et al [4] propose a novel approach to improve performance for the determination of parameters of an extreme value distribution applied to three populations to analyze maximum annual flows in Mexico. Using climate models, Alvarez-Castro et al [5] investigated the recurrence spectra of European temperature in historic simulations of the CMIP5 and of EUROCORDEX.…”