Project: Reproduction of links between atmospheric circulation and surface air temperature and precipitation distributions in climate models

Regional climate models (RCMs) driven by global climate models (GCMs) are the most widely used tools for simulating regional scenarios of climate change. Since their control outputs suffer from many deficiencies in the reproduction of recent climate conditions, it is important to identify sources of these errors and to address them in further development of the models. The proposed project makes use of outputs of several European projects on climate modelling and deals with links between atmospheric circulation and distributions of surface variables over central Europe, with emphasis on tails of the distributions and extremes. Among the aims of the project are (i) to modify circulation classifications applicable into RCM outputs over central Europe, (ii) to identify errors in RCM-simulated distributions of circulation indices/types, (iii) to identify errors in simulated distributions of daily maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation under particular circulation types, (iv) to evaluate the role of persistence of circulation types on simulated temperature distributions and extremes, and (v) to compare the performance of individual RCMs and the dependence of results on the driving GCM.

Funded by: GA ČR. GAP209/10/2265

Duration: 2010-2014

Investigator: Kyselý, J.