Future change of precipitation extremes in Europe: Intercomparison of scenarios from regional climate models

An analysis of the climate of precipitation extremes as simulated by six European regional climate models (RCMs) is undertaken in order to describe/quantify future changes and to examine/interpret differences between models. Each model has adopted boundary conditions from the same ensemble of global climate model integrations for present (1961–1990) and future (2071–2100) climate under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A2 emission scenario. The main diagnostics are multiyear return values of daily precipitation totals estimated from extreme value analysis. An evaluation of the RCMs against observations in the Alpine region shows that model biases for extremes are comparable to or even smaller than…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• EC
  European Commission
• MO
  Met Office
• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung