Regional climate change scenarios for Greece: Future temperature and precipitation projections from ensembles of RCMs

Abstract

The potential regional future changes in seasonal (winter and summer) temperature and precipitation are assessed for the greater area of Greece over the 21st century, under A2, A1B and B2 future emission scenarios of IPCC. Totally twenty-two simulations from various regional climate models (RCMs) were assessed; fourteen of them with a spatial grid resolution of 50km for the period 2071-2100 under A2 (9 simulations) and B2 (5 simulations) scenarios and eight of them with an even finer resolution of 25km under A1B scenario for both 2021-2050 and 2071-2100 time periods. The future changes in temperature and precipitation were calculated with respect to the control period (1961-1990). All the models estimated warmer and dryer conditions over the study area. The warming is more intense during the summer months, with the changes being larger in the continental than in the marine area of Greece. In terms of precipitation, the simulations of the RCMs estimate a decrease up to -60% (A2 scenario). Finally it is shown that the changes in the atmospheric circulation over Europe play a key role in the changes of the future precipitation and temperature characteristics over the domain of study in a consistent way for the different emission scenarios. © 2012 Global NEST.