Modelling climate analogue regions for a central European city

Lynn Reuter (), Alexander Graf, Klaus Goergen, Niels Döscher () and Michael Leuchner
Additional contact information
Lynn Reuter: RWTH Aachen University
Alexander Graf: Agrosphere Institute, IBG-3, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
Klaus Goergen: Agrosphere Institute, IBG-3, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
Niels Döscher: RWTH Aachen University
Michael Leuchner: RWTH Aachen University

Climatic Change, 2023, vol. 176, issue 5, No 15, 22 pages

Abstract: Abstract In this study, we describe a methodology to derive climate analogue cities for spatially highly resolved future climate scenarios. For the computation, a reduced and in hindsight bias-adjusted EURO-CORDEX EUR-11 dataset is used based on two climate scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). A total of 389 European cities are processed by the algorithm, which uses five statistical climate variables (2-m air temperature average and amplitude, precipitation sum and amplitude, correlation between 2-m air temperature average and precipitation sum). Additionally, extreme weather events (hot days, summer days, tropical nights, extreme precipitation events) are calculated for further comparison and validation. Finding an appropriate analogue permits a more accurate derivation and depiction of necessary climate adaptation efforts and therefore assist decision-making in city planning. As an example of our method, we searched for plausible climate twins for the mid-sized city of Aachen (Germany) at the end of the twenty-first century. Our results show that the French city of Dijon is highly likely to become Aachen’s climate twin by the end of the century for RCP4.5. As for the scenario RCP8.5, no clear European analogue city could be determined, indicating that the city might enter a novel climate. The nearest match suggests the cities of Florence and Prato in Tuscany. However, considering climate indices, the encompassing region of the French–Spanish city triangle Bordeaux–Toulouse–Bilbao is a better fit. The developed algorithm can be applied to any of the cities included in the dataset.

Keywords: Climate analogue cities; Climate twins; Climate change; Regional climate models; EURO-CORDEX (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-023-03531-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:176:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s10584-023-03531-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-023-03531-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().