Central European heat waves and cold spells in regional climate model simulations

Abstract

Heat waves and cold spells are important phenomena of the Central European climate that have major impact on natural environment and society. We use 7 regional climate model (RCM) runs driven by the ERA 40 reanalysis from the ENSEMBLES project to evaluate simulated heat waves and cold spells over Central Europe against observed events from the E OBS gridded dataset.

While their climatological characteristics are reproduced reasonably well in the RCMs ensemble, major deficiencies in simulating heat waves and cold spells in individual years are found. Therefore, several case analyses are performed in order to identify sources of these errors.

Keywords

• heat waves
• cold spells
• regional climate models
• Central Europe