标题：Evaluation of EURO-CORDEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the Euro-Mediterranean area) historical simulations by high-quality observational datasets in southern Italy insights on drought assessment
摘要：Many recent studies indicate climate change as aphenomenon that significantly alters the water cycle in different regionsworldwide, also implying new challenges in water resource management anddrought risk assessment. To this end, it is of key importance to ascertainthe quality of regional climate models (RCMs), which are commonly used forassessing at proper spatial resolutions future impacts of climate change onhydrological events. In this study, we propose a statistical methodologicalframework to assess the quality of the EURO-CORDEX RCMs concerning theirability to simulate historic climate (temperature and precipitation, the basic variables that determine meteorological drought). We thenspecifically focus on drought characteristics (duration, accumulateddeficit, intensity, and return period) determined by the theory of runs atseasonal and annual timescales by comparison with high-density andhigh-quality ground-based observational datasets. In particular, theproposed methodology is applied to the Sicily and Calabria regions (southernItaly), where long historical precipitation and temperature series wererecorded by the ground-based monitoring networks operated by the formerRegional Hydrographic Offices, whose density is considerably greater thanobservational gridded datasets available at the European level, such asE-OBS or CRU-TS. Results show that among the more skilful models able toreproduce, overall, precipitation and temperature variability as well asdrought characteristics, many are based on the CLM-Community RCM,particularly in combination with the HadGEM2 global circulation model (GCM). Nevertheless, the rankingof the models may slightly change depending on the specific variableanalysed as well as the temporal and spatial scale of interest. From thispoint of view, the proposed methodology highlights the skills and weaknessesof the different configurations and can serve as an aid for selecting themost suitable climate model for assessing climate change impacts on droughtprocesses and the underlying variables.
