Assessing the contribution of different factors in regional climate model projections using the factor separation method

Abstract

This study applies the factor separation (FS) method to investigate the contributions of different factors, along with their synergy, on a set of regional climate model (RCM) projections for the Mediterranean region. The FS method is applied to six projections for the period 1970-2100 performed with the regional model RegCM4 over the Med-CORDEX domain. Two different sets of factors are intercompared, namely the driving global climate model (GCM) boundary conditions against two model physics settings (convection scheme and irrigation). We demonstrate the usefulness of the FS method to assess different sources of uncertainty in RCM-based regional climate projections.