Abstract
Climatological studies indicate that climate change lead to an increase in the mean global temperature of around 0.5 °C until the end of the twentieth century. This warming impacts the atmospheric humidity, wind, radiation, and precipitation. However, the magnitude of changes is not equally distributed over the globe but differs markedly with regions, making a regionalization of the global information essential. The GLOWA-Danube project follows such a downscaling approach with the focus on the drainage basin of the Upper Danube River.
Since the horizontal resolution of global climate simulations (approx. 200 km) is still too coarse for studies on regional or even local scales, the results of the global projections are post-processed using the regional climate model MM5 to downscale the information to 45 km. The empirical-statistical method AtmoMM5 subsequently downscaled the MM5 results to the desired resolution of 1 km.
In order to test the quality of the meteorological data used in DANUBIA, the time series of different proxels within the period from 1991 to 2000 were compared with corresponding periods from the station measurements. The station measurements are interpolated with respect to distance and direction on a regular grid. These gridded fields in general follow the pattern of the observed precipitation and 2 m air temperature. The scaling of the regional model MM5 with AtmoMM5 causes a distinct reduction of the root mean square error between the observations and MM5 or AtmoMM5, respectively.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Daly C, Neilson RP, Phillips DL (1994) A statistical topographic model for mapping climatological precipitation over mountainous terrain. J Appl Meteorol 33:140–158
Früh B, Schipper JW, Pfeiffer A, Wirth V (2006) A pragmatic approach for downscaling precipitation in Alpine scale complex terrain. Meteorol Z 15:631–646
Grell GA, Dudhia J, Stauffer DR (1994) A description of the fifth-generation Penn State/NCAR mesoscale model (MM5). NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-398 + STR, Boulder, USA, p 138
IPCC (2001) Climate change 2001: synthesis report. A contribution of Working Groups I, II, and III to the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Watson RT, The Core Writing Team, eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York, p 398
Schwarb M, Daly C, Frei C, Schär C (2001) Mean annual and seasonal precipitation in the European Alps 19711990. Hydrological Atlas of Switzerland. Plates 2.6 and 2.7, Federal Office for Water and Geology, Bern
Shepard D (1968) A two-dimensional interpolation function for irregularly-spaced data. In: Proceedings of 23rd ACM national conference. Brandon/Systems Press, Princeton, pp 517–524
Simmons AJ, Gibson JK (2000) The ERA-40 project plan. ERA-40 Project Report Series, No. 1, Reading, UK. Available at http://old.ecmwf.int/publications/library/do/references/list/192. Accessed 20 May 2015
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Früh, B., Wirth, V., Egger, J., Pfeiffer, A., Schipper, J.W. (2016). Precipitation and Temperature. In: Mauser, W., Prasch, M. (eds) Regional Assessment of Global Change Impacts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16751-0_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16751-0_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16750-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16751-0
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)