Analysis of an ensemble of present day and future regional climate simulations for Greece

Abstract

This study investigates the simulated changes in temperature and precipitation over Greece from nine Regional Climate Models (RCMs) for the period 2071-2100 under the A2 emission scenario and evaluates their performance during the control period 1961-1990 using Greek gridded datasets of temperature and precipitation. In winter, most RCMs show a bias towards warmer and dryer conditions and a bias towards higher inter-annual temperature variability and lower inter-annual variability of precipitation than the Greek gridded datasets during the control period 1961-1990. In summer, all RCMs show a cold bias for the maritime sub-regions and generally all sub-regions show very small biases in precipitation. Concerning the future projections of the RCMs for Greece the mean change of the nine RCMs for the mean air temperature, T 2mean, between the future period and the control period for the integrated Greek domain is 3.4 °C for winter and 4.5 °C for summer with the changes being larger in continental than in the marine sub-regions. The inter-annual temperature variability in the future simulations generally increases in summer and decreases in winter almost for all RCMs with these changes being larger in the continental sub-regions than in maritime sub-regions of Greece. Almost all RCMs simulate a decrease of the precipitation for the future climate for both winter and summer with the inter-annual variability of summer precipitation decreasing for the majority of RCMs. The reported future climatic changes will have important impacts for the region of Greece in vital sectors such as water resources, agriculture, tourism, forest fire risk and energy demand. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society.