Evaluation of Temperature and Precipitation in Coupled Regional Climate Model Simulations

Climate change is expected to have major impacts on society and ecosystems during the upcoming decades. The exact quantification of the climate change signal to be expected, however, is still associated with many uncertainties. For an atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) uncertainties in projecting future climate arise from a number of different sources: uncertainties in physical process understanding and model formulation, natural climate variability, and the amount of future anthropogenic greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. When analyzing AOGCM-driven regional climate model (RCM) simulations, which are often applied to provide local climate change information to the impacts community and policy makers, a further level of model uncertainty is introduced. An important step towards quantifying model uncertainty is the analysis of systematic model biases and of the the inter-model spread of the climate change signals obtained.