Publication and Analyses of High-Resolution Regional Climate Simulations for Europe

While climate change in the 21 $$^{st}$$ st century is a fundamentally global phenomenon, it will unfold its effects on the regional scale. There will be impacts on the regional energy and water cycles; of particular concern are changes of the intensity and frequency of extreme events such as droughts or extreme precipitation. Further the impact of climate change on yield and yield quality and crop rotations, water regime, agricultural production systems and land is concerning. Multi-model ensembles of regional climate simulations are required to make projections of the climate in the future and to evaluate the ability of models to represent extreme events. For instance, this is realized in the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment CORDEX for continental scale model domains, e.g. Europe. WRFCLIM at HLRS contributed to these multi-model ensembles with simulations based on the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model. The simulations were carried out within the framework of the BMBF funded Project ReKliEs-De (Regionale Klimaprojektionen Ensemble für Deutschland) for the time period 1958 to 2100 at 12 km resolution. They represent the first WRF climate projections which have been realized on the HLRS supercomputer yet and are now listed by the German Weather Service as members of the reference ensemble regional climate projections and they passed the audit of regional climate projections by the Bavarian Environmental Agency (LfU) within the KLIWA Cooperation ( https://www.kliwa.de/ ). The spread of the ReKliEs-De ensemble results supports the confidence not only in the estimation of the evolution of medians of atmospheric variables due to climate change but also in the estimation of extreme values. The climate indices underline the importance for society and economy to mitigate climate change. In the reporting period the results were processed and published on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) ready to use for climate and climate impact studies for Europe.