Projections of Heavy Precipitation Characteristics Over the Greater Alpine Region Using a Kilometer–Scale Climate Model Ensemble

Abstract

This study presents a detailed analysis of the CORDEX-FPS multi-model ensemble of convection-permitting climate simulations over the greater Alpine region. These simulations cover 10-year time slices and were obtained by downscaling global climate model (GCM) projections, using regional climate models (RCMs) and kilometer-scale convection-permitting models (CPMs). Our analysis over the Alpine area agrees with previous studies in terms of projected summer precipitation changes for the end of the century, in particular regarding a decrease in mean precipitation and increases in hourly precipitation intensities. In addition, we assess projected changes over different subregions, provide analyses at monthly and seasonal basis for temporal aggregations ranging from 1 hr to 5 days, address different extreme precipitation indices, and present validation against an Alpine-scale daily precipitation data set and an hourly precipitation product based on 3 Doppler radars. The evaluation reveals that CPMs show a refinement of spatial patterns, reduce the overestimation of precipitation frequency, and better capture intense precipitation characteristics. The improvements are especially apparent on the sub-daily scale and in the summer season. Convection-Permitting Model climate projections show an increase in precipitation intensity for all seasons and across all temporal aggregations in all regions, except for the Mediterranean in summer. The projections from different CPMs qualitatively agree, despite significant differences in the GCMs circulation changes, suggesting that the increase in heavy events is primarily due to thermodynamic effects. We also present a hypothesis explaining why projections of relative changes in hourly precipitation percentiles are similar between CPMs and RCMs, despite large biases in RCMs.