A Regional Climate Model Simulation for EURO-CORDEX with the WRF Model

In order to provide high-resolution ensembles and comparisons of regional climate simulations, the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) initiated the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). CORDEX is performed in preparation of the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) (Giorgi et al., WMO Bull 58:175–183, 2009). Verification runs for CORDEX are performed for most continents for a 20-year period (1989–2009) driven by ERA-interim data from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF). For Europe (EURO-CORDEX, http://www.euro-cordex.net) an ensemble of regional climate model simulations from 1989 to 2008 on 0. 11∘, 0. 22∘ and 0. 44∘ has been completed in May 2012. The University of Hohenheim contributed to EURO-CORDEX with a simulation with Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model on the CRAY XE6 of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart. The model consists of a spatial grid of 424*412*54 grid cells and is run with a timestep of 60 s on 1,280 processors. Three-hourly output of the atmospheric and terrestrial variables is written to daily netcdf-files each of the size of 8.5 GB. The simulations’ set up is described and a comparison of the results to an observational precipitation data set for Germany is shown.