Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Summer Precipitation over Central Europe in a Suite of High Resolution Climate Models
AbstractHigh impact, locally intense rainfall episodes represent a major socioeconomic problem for societies worldwide, and at the same time these events are notoriously difficult to simulate properly in climate models. Here, the authors investigate how horizontal resolution and model formulation influence this issue by applying the HIRLAM ALADIN Regional Mesoscale Operational NWP in Europe (HARMONIE) Climate (HCLIM) regional model with three different setups: two using convection parameterization at 15 and 6.25 km horizontal resolution (the latter within the "gray zone" scale) with lateral boundary conditions provided by ERA Interim and integrated over a pan European domain, and one with explicit convection at 2 km resolution (HCLIM2) over the Alpine region driven by the 15 km model. Seven summer seasons were sampled and validated against two high resolution observational datasets. All HCLIM versions underestimate the number of dry days and hours by 20% 40% and overestimate precipitation over the Alpin.