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| Titel |
Large scale European drought within a high resolution climate model |
| VerfasserIn |
Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes, Leonard C. Shaffery, Pier Luigi Vidale |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2010
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 12 (2010) |
| Datensatznummer |
250034231
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Increased resolution has led to significant improvements in the representation of weather
systems within coupled climate models. Droughts are amongst the most costly weather events
that affect Europe and understanding the potential for change in the character of European
drought is of tremendous societal importance. A prerequisite for confidence in predictions of
the nature of droughts under future climates is that climate models can reproduce droughts
characteristic of the present climate. Drought characterisation is an intrinsically
spatio-temporal problem and we use an explicit 3-dimensional (longitude, latitude, time)
structure-based method to compare modelled droughts with observations. Specifically, we
compare European droughts generated by the HiGEM1 coupled climate model run with
present day atmospheric composition with drought events extracted from the CRU
TS3 observational data set. The results demonstrate consistency in both the rate of
drought occurrence and the spatio-temporal structure of the events. Estimates of the
probability density functions for event area, duration and severity are shown to be similar
with confidence > 90%. Encouragingly, HiGEM is shown to replicate the extreme
tails of the observed distributions and thus the most damaging European drought
events.
1 HiGEM is based on the latest climate configuration of the Met Office Hadley Centre
Unified Model (HadGEM1) with the horizontal resolution increased to 1.25 x 0.83 degrees
in longitude and latitude in the atmosphere and 1/3 x 1/3 degrees in the ocean. |
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