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| Titel |
The Palmer Drought index: Comparing index values from ENSEMBLES models and observations. |
| VerfasserIn |
Cathrine Fox Maule, Peter Thejll, Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250050369
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| Zusammenfassung |
| The Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) was developed, in the middle of
the 20th century, to help US farmers and agricultural support agencies
deal with the effects of droughts. It has since been further developed
in order to be applicable elsewhere - and we apply the so-called
Self-Calibrated PDSI (sc-PDSI) to the regional climate model collection
from the EU-financed ENSEMBLES project in order to understand the role
that regional climate models (RCMs) may play in drought investigations
in Europe. We calculate the sc-PDSI for 14 models, and the model mean,
and compare it to the observed values in 23 European regions, using
the recently published drought catalogue by Lloyd-Hughes et al. (2010).
We find that most models have skill, in the statistical sense, to explain
observed drought in the period 1961 to 2000. The best models are the
ETHZ CLM and CHMI ALADIN models. We also find that some regions pose
great difficulties for almost all models - these are typically small
mountainous regions in the central or eastern parts of Europe. We
also offer a discussion of how the insights we have gathered from
these observationally forced models are challenged by the next step -
that of using the sc-PDSI, or some other measure of drought severity -
in models of the future, such as scenario-based model runs. |
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