Robustness of high-resolution regional climate projections for Greenland: a method for uncertainty distillation

Managing adaptation to climate changes in Greenland will depend, to a large degree, on high-resolution climate simulations and associated uncertainty estimates. A single high-resolution climate simulation is generally insufficient to quantify the uncertainty of a given scenario projection. For Green...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Climate research 2018-01, Vol.76 (3), p.253-268
Main Authors: Olesen, Martin, Christensen, Jens Hesselbjerg, Kaas, Eigil, Boberg, Fredrik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Climate change
Climate models
Climatic indexes
Computer simulation
Distillation
Distilling
Earth
Environmental assessment
Global climate
Global climate models
High resolution
Methods
Regional analysis
Regional climate models
Regional climates
Resolution
Simulation
Temperature
Temperature effects
Test procedures
Uncertainty
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Managing adaptation to climate changes in Greenland will depend, to a large degree, on high-resolution climate simulations and associated uncertainty estimates. A single high-resolution climate simulation is generally insufficient to quantify the uncertainty of a given scenario projection. For Greenland, this becomes a critical issue because of a lack of high-resolution climate experiments for this region. Therefore, we introduce and test a new method to solve this uncertainty assessment problem. Using the regional climate model (RCM) HIRHAM5 over Greenland in combination with an ensemble of RCM simulations from a different geographical setting, (i.e. EURO-CORDEX), we investigate to what extent the uncertainty of projected climate change at high resolution can be evaluated from corresponding temperature spreads in a wider set of global climate models (GCMs), that is, CMIP5. The study is based on a set of time-slice simulations downscaled with HIRHAM5 at 5.5 km resolution for the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios for Greenland with boundary information from the GCM EC-Earth. Our proposed uncertainty assessment method establishes a foundation on which high-resolution and relatively costly regional climate projections can be assessed as well as when using only a single RCM without the presence of analogous downscaling experiments with other RCMs and GCMs, and instead relying on existing information from CMIP5. Thus, the uncertainty of a wide range of climate indices that scales with temperature can be evaluated and quantified through the inter-model temperature spread within CMIP5.
ISSN:0936-577X
1616-1572
DOI:10.3354/cr01536