Regional Climate Projections

Abstract

When designing adaptation and mitigation measures of climate change for the coming decades and up to the middle of the century, policymakers and industries must rely upon climate information that is at an appropriate scale to evaluate impacts, vulnerabilities and risks due to changes in climate. It is, therefore, essential that the quantitative information on the climate and its impacts is reliable. Reliable quantitative information about climate change impacts must also be available. This includes estimations of uncertainty bounds. In the current state of knowledge, technology and structure of scientific communities, climate change impact studies are achieved from a suite of models: global earth system models, with a generally low-resolution (100-300 km), regional limited-area climate models with a higher resolution (10-50 km), which take their boundary conditions from global models and impact models calculating how changes in weather, ocean and biogeochemical cycles affect the system to be adapted.

Assessing future climate change impacts in the EU and the USA: insights and lessons from two continental-scale projects*

“…Much of the physical science work in the ACP was focused on leveraging GCM projections in a manner that worked around these limitations. In PESETA III, higher resolution regional climate model (RCM) projections were used, yet the nested RCMs cannot correct for errors in large-scale dynamical structures transmitted from GCMs and have inherent climate biases that can be quite large when underpinning processes are poorly constrained by observations (Vautard 2018). Similarly, a major interest of the economic and policy analysis community are the climate consequences of specific temperature thresholds (e.g.…”