Evaluation of EURO-CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the Euro-Mediterranean area) historical simulations by high-quality observational datasets in southern Italy: insights on drought assessment
2020
Abstract. Many recent studies indicate climate change as a
phenomenon that significantly alters the water cycle in different regions
worldwide, also implying new challenges in water resource management and
drought risk assessment. To this end, it is of key importance to ascertain
the quality of regional climate models (RCMs), which are commonly used for
assessing at proper spatial resolutions future impacts of climate change on
hydrological events. In this study, we propose a statistical methodological
framework to assess the quality of the EURO-CORDEX RCMs concerning their
ability to simulate historic climate (temperature and precipitation, the basic variables that determine meteorological drought). We then
specifically focus on drought characteristics (duration, accumulated
deficit, intensity, and return period) determined by the theory of runs at
seasonal and annual timescales by comparison with high-density and
high-quality ground-based observational datasets. In particular, the
proposed methodology is applied to the Sicily and Calabria regions (southern
Italy), where long historical precipitation and temperature series were
recorded by the ground-based monitoring networks operated by the former
Regional Hydrographic Offices, whose density is considerably greater than
observational gridded datasets available at the European level, such as
E-OBS or CRU-TS. Results show that among the more skilful models able to
reproduce, overall, precipitation and temperature variability as well as
drought characteristics, many are based on the CLM-Community RCM,
particularly in combination with the HadGEM2 global circulation model (GCM). Nevertheless, the ranking
of the models may slightly change depending on the specific variable
analysed as well as the temporal and spatial scale of interest. From this
point of view, the proposed methodology highlights the skills and weaknesses
of the different configurations and can serve as an aid for selecting the
most suitable climate model for assessing climate change impacts on drought
processes and the underlying variables.
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