ICARIA: dynamically downscaled climate projections using two regional climate models

ICARIA project had as one of its main purposes to develop coherent, reliable and usable downscaled climate projections from the last CMIP6 in order to construct the basis for efficient support to climate adaptation and decision-making of the related stakeholders, supporting the adaptation of critical assets within the project. These projections were obtained with also the purpose to be freely available for further use in subsequent studies and, hence, foster adaptation to climate change in more areas. Therefore, ICARIA’s climate information is already based on CMIP6 models and incorporating in its workflow the current SSPs. The presented high-resolution future climate projections display a unique dataset. These models will provide the scenarios to be considered within the Risk Assessment and the design and development of all adaptation measures coming as ICARIA outcomes.

Please note that the provided data displays an example of the 2m temperature and precipitation fields for interested people to investigate the models domain. Overall, hourly output of main model parameters (see table below) are available upon request!

For further details, find here a brief of the methodology followed:

For the dynamically downscaled climate projections, two Regional Climate Models for the scenarios SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 were used and respectively initialised with the outputs of two CMIP6 GCMs. The COSMO-CLM (CCLM) was selected to downscale the EC-EARTH3-Veg global model while the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model was considered to downscale the MPI-ESM1-2-HR global model. The domains considered for the dynamical downscaling are Austria and South Aegean Region for WRF and Salzburg and South Aegean Region for CCLM. The differences in the domain set-up stems from the fact that the WRF simulations are carried out with a 5 km x 5 km spatial resolution, whereas CCLM with a resolution of 2km x 2km which relates to longer simulation times and therefore constrains the size of the domain. All simulations have hourly output and are performed until 2100.