Benefits and added value of convection-permitting climate modeling over Fenno-Scandinavia
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Benefits and added value of convection‑permitting climate modeling over Fenno‑Scandinavia Petter Lind1 · Danijel Belušić1 · Ole B. Christensen2 · Andreas Dobler3 · Erik Kjellström1 · Oskar Landgren3 · David Lindstedt1 · Dominic Matte4 · Rasmus A. Pedersen2 · Erika Toivonen5 · Fuxing Wang1 Received: 27 March 2020 / Accepted: 3 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Convection-permitting climate models have shown superior performance in simulating important aspects of the precipitation climate including extremes and also to give partly different climate change signals compared to coarser-scale models. Here, we present the first long-term (1998–2018) simulation with a regional convection-permitting climate model for FennoScandinavia. We use the HARMONIE-Climate (HCLIM) model on two nested grids; one covering Europe at 12 km resolution (HCLIM12) using parameterized convection, and one covering Fenno-Scandinavia with 3 km resolution (HCLIM3) with explicit deep convection. HCLIM12 uses lateral boundaries from ERA-Interim reanalysis. Model results are evaluated against reanalysis and various observational data sets, some at high resolutions. HCLIM3 strongly improves the representation of precipitation compared to HCLIM12, most evident through reduced “drizzle” and increased occurrence of higher intensity events as well as improved timing and amplitude of the diurnal cycle. This is the case even though the model exhibits a cold bias in near-surface temperature, particularly for daily maximum temperatures in summer. Simulated winter precipitation is biased high, primarily over complex terrain. Considerable undercatchment in observations may partly explain the wet bias. Examining instead the relative occurrence of snowfall versus rain, which is sensitive to variance in topographic heights it is shown that HCLIM3 provides added value compared to HCLIM12 also for winter precipitation. These results, indicating clear benefits of convection-permitting models, are encouraging motivating further exploration of added value in this region, and provide a valuable basis for impact studies. Keywords Convection-permitting climate modeling · HARMONIE-climate · Fenno-Scandinavia · Precipitation · Diurnal cycle · Extremes
1 Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05359-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Petter Lind [email protected] 1
Rossby Centre, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, Folkborgsvägen 17, 60176 Norrköping, Sweden
2
Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
3
Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway
4
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
5
Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland
Projected future warming in northern Europe is among the largest in the world, driven to a large extent by the strong positive feedback involving reduction of snow and ice as the climate warms (Collins et al. 2013). As a result of global warmi
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