Simulation of the climate of the XX century in the Alpine space

E. Bucchignani (), A. Sanna, S. Gualdi, S. Castellari and P. Schiano

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2013, vol. 67, issue 3, 990 pages

Abstract: The purpose of this work is the analysis of the capabilities of the Limited Area Model COSMO-CLM in simulating the main features of the observed climate over an area characterized by complex orography. Two sets of simulations of the XX century climate have been carried out, at a spatial resolution of 14 km, in order to provide a detailed description of the climate variability on local scale, useful for impact studies. A first experimental set-up consists of a set of simulations driven by the boundary conditions provided by the global model SINTEX-G. Our aim is to test the capability of this experimental set in realistically reproducing the main characteristics of the Alpine region climate under present climate conditions in order to provide a reliable tool for future climate scenario investigations. A second set of simulations has been carried out, driven by ERA40 reanalysis, in order to test the influence of the global model boundary conditions. Results are shown in terms of 2-m temperature and total precipitation and they are compared with two observational datasets: CRU and ARPA Piedmont. A good capability of the model in reproducing both the mean field and the seasonal cycle of temperature is observed, while the precipitation is affected by accuracy problems, related to the resolution. Though the model resolution is fine enough to reproduce fairly well the intensity of winter precipitation, it often fails in its localization. As far as summer precipitation is concerned, the model resolution appears too coarse to simulate the localized convection, which characterizes summer precipitation over Alps. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2013

Keywords: Alpine space; Regional climate simulations; Seasonal temperature and precipitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-011-9883-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:nathaz:v:67:y:2013:i:3:p:981-990

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-011-9883-8

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().