Abstract
How anthropogenic climate change will affect the climate in dry and semi-arid regions has important implications for the course of regional development. It has become increasingly common to use high-resolution regional climate models (RCMs) nested within coarser-resolution global climate models to downscale climate change projections. The aim is to obtain physically consistent information about future climate with enhanced geographical detail1,2,3. Recently, it has been demonstrated4,5 that RCMs share systematic temperature-dependent biases, which affect their ability to capture accurately certain observable climate conditions. Here, we show that owing to a broad tendency for climate models (regional and global) to show systematic biases in warm, dry climates, it is likely that, at present, many climate models overestimate regional amplification of global warming. We study Europe using the central Mediterranean as an example. To correct for individual model deficiencies, we apply a bias correction conditioned on temperature. The results demonstrate that projections of intense mean summer warming partly result from model deficiencies, and when corrected for, the Mediterranean summer temperature projections are reduced by up to one degree, on average by 10–20%. Individual models may be overestimating warming by several degrees.
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Acknowledgements
The ENSEMBLES project was supported by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme under the Thematic Sub-Priority ‘Global Change and Ecosystems’. We acknowledge the E-OBS and RCM modelling data set from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES and the data providers in the ECA&D project. We acknowledge the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel data set. Support of this data set is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. The present work received financial support from the Danish Strategic Research Council through its support of Centre for Regional Change in the Earth System (CRES; www.cres-centre.dk) under contract no DSF-EnMi 09-066868.
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F.B. and J.H.C. designed the study and wrote the manuscript. F.B. carried out the analyses.
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Boberg, F., Christensen, J. Overestimation of Mediterranean summer temperature projections due to model deficiencies. Nature Clim Change 2, 433–436 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1454
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1454
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