Casanueva Vicente, Ana

Dahinden, Fabienne

Kotlarski, Sven

English

UCrea

Geophysical Research AbstractsVol. 20, EGU2018-19387, 2018EGU General Assembly 2018© Author(s) 2018. CC Attribution 4.0 license.Analogs for the future Swiss climateSven Kotlarski (1), Ana Casanueva (1), and Fabienne Dahinden (2)(1) Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, CH-8058 Zurich-Airport, Switzerland, (2) Institute forAtmospheric and Climate Sciences, ETH Zurich, CH-8006 Zurich, SwitzerlandProjected climate change in in the European Alps as represented by the current EURO-CORDEX regionalclimate scenario ensemble can be associated with a considerable modification of the present-day temperature andprecipitation climate. In terms of climate communication, it can however be difficult to grasp the meaning andthe consequences of, for instance, a 2.5 ◦C temperature increase in wintertime or a 20 % summer precipitationdecrease. To better illustrate such changes, climate analogs can be useful. Climate analogs are locations that todayexperience a climate that is similar to the projected (i.e. the future) climate of a given site of interest. The recentwork by Dahinden et al. (2017) introduced a method to identify such analogs based on the normalized similarityof climatological seasonal mean values of temperature and precipitation between the projected climate for a siteof interest, and the present-day climate of a potential analog.Here, a modified version of this technique is applied to identify climate analogs for individual sites inSwitzerland. For this purpose, bias-adjusted EURO-CORDEX scenarios for the RCP8.5 emission scenario andfor the end of the century (2070-2099) are used. As potential analogs 2472 stations in Europe are considered,for which the present-day climate of the reference period 1981 - 2010 can be derived based on available dailyobservation data (data sources: ECAD, GSOD and the automated MeteoSwiss network).Exemplary results in terms of combined temperature and precipitation analogs (maximum normalized simi-larity of seasonal mean values for both variables) for the four sites Zurich, Weissfluhjoch, Lugano and Sion areshown. For all stations except Weissfluhjoch the best analogs are found at more southern latitudes and are mostlylocated in the Mediterranean region. An exception is the fourth-ranked analog for Zurich which is located at thecoast of the Black Seas (Sochi, Russia). For the high-alpine site of Weissfluhjoch climate analogs can be found inthe Alpine region itself, but are typically located at lower elevations in Italy and Germany.If projected future precipitation is disregarded and only temperature conditions are considered, the best cli-mate analogs are typically found at even more southern locations. Here, present-day temperature conditions areclose to the projected climate for Swiss sites for RCP8.5 at the end of the Century but drier climates than projectedfor Switzerland typically prevail. The latter is the reason why these sites are typically not among the combinedtemperature and precipitation analogs. For Zurich the five best temperature analogs are all located in Spain whilefor Lugano and Sion they are spread along the entire coastline of the Mediterranean Sea. For Weissfluhjoch,again, geographically closer analogs that are located at lower elevations are found. An outstanding exceptionis the Russian site of Vajda-Guba located on a Russian peninsula in the Barents Sea which is the second-besttemperature analog for Weissfluhjoch.F Dahinden, EM Fischer, R Knutti (2017) Future local climate unlike currently observed anywhere. Envi-ron. Res. Lett. 12(8) 084004

Analog for the future Swiss climate

https://repositorio.unican.es/xmlui/bitstream/10902/18595/3/Analogforthefuture.pdf

Analog for the future Swiss climate

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UCrea