EURO-SUPREME: Sub-daily precipitation extremes in the EURO-CORDEX ensemble

Abstract

Extreme precipitation events can lead to devastating floods, loss of life and severe infrastructure damage and are expected to increase in a warming world, highlighting the urgent need to quantify current-day and future extremes. Although intense precipitation extremes are generally better represented by high-resolution climate models, large ensemble datasets are lacking. Yet, these are very essential for estimating uncertainties of future trends. Here, the EURO-SUPREME (EURO-SUb-daily PRecipitation extrEMEs) dataset, with DOI: 10.26050/WDCC/EUCOR_prec_v2 , is presented that includes extreme precipitation events from the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model (RCM) ensemble (downscaling CMIP5 GCMs), for accumulated precipitation amounts ranging from 1 to 72 h. Specifically, the data are based on a small ensemble of evaluation runs and a 35-member ensemble of historical and future (RCP8.5) annual-maxima on the EURO-CORDEX EUR-11 (0.11°) domain, covering 4984 simulation years in total. The resource is designed to enable climate-model comparison and support various state-of-the-art scientific research efforts and climate-change risk assessments. We provide a validation of the EURO-SUPREME dataset for various countries in Europe and disentangle the RCM and GCM contributions to the biases. Furthermore, we provide a practical application of using EURO-SUPREME as a benchmark for high-resolution convection-permitting models for Belgium. Finally, we investigate the changes in intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation under different global warming levels.