Csaba Zsolt Torma

and 2 more

This study aims to give a brief overview of an ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) simulations with bias correction for daily precipitation for the Carpathian Region located in Central/Eastern Europe. Within the international initiation called the COordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) EURO-CORDEX and Med-CORDEX provide RCM simulations targeting Europe as a whole or in a part at the grid resolutions of 0.44o (~50 km) and 0.11o (~12 km). The ensemble of RCMs provides a huge amount of data, which are however prone to biases compared to high resolution observations. Percentile-based bias corrections of the daily precipitation output of EURO-CORDEX and Med-CORDEX RCM ensemble at a common 0.11o × 0.11o horizontal grid resolution are performed based on the high-resolution, high-quality observational dataset: CARPATCLIM. The region covered by the CARPATCLIM dataset can be considered as the Carpathian Region for which the RCM ensemble (consisting of total six members at 0.11o resolution) of a historical period (1976-2005) and under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 over two future time slices (2021-2050 and 2070-2099) are assessed. The present study focuses on precipitation climate indices over the entire Carpathian Region and two subregions representing high- and lowlands within the target region. The analyzed indices are: frequency of rainy days (RR1, days with a total rainfall of at least 1 mm), heavy precipitation days (RR10, days with a total rainfall of at least 10 mm), highest daily precipitation (RX1), maximum consecutive dry days (CDD, the duration of the longest period with < 1 mm total daily precipitation), maximum consecutive wet periods (CWD, the duration of the longest period with > 1 mm total daily precipitation). The key findings are as follows: (1) the influence of orography on seasonal precipitation change is evident throughout the analyzed periods, (2) precipitation change holds an unequivocal seasonality as most models estimate significant winter (DJF) precipitation increase (~30%), while in general drier (~20%) summers (JJA) are projected over most part of the Carpathian Region by the end of the 21st century, (3) over the subregions RR10 shows a clear signal of increase in all seasons (10-50%), except summer (~-15%), while RX1 shows increase in all seasons.