Analysis of regional climate change modelling experiments for the Carpathian Basin

In the last decade, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) nested in Global Climate Models (GCMs) have become essential tools to make climate projections with fine spatial resolution. In this paper, control runs of the RCMs RegCM and PRECIS are discussed and compared for the Central/Eastern European region. Both RCMs are three-dimensional, sigma-coordinate, primitive equation models, for the control experiments (1961-1990), they use initial and lateral boundary conditions from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) reanalysis data sets (ERA-40). For the validation, monthly data sets of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia are used. According to the results, the model RegCM generally underestimates the temperature, while the model PRECIS overestimates it. The precipitation is generally overestimated by the RegCM simulations, and underestimated by the PRECIS simulations. In the case of PRECIS, a model experiment for the Central/Eastern European region for the 2071-2100 period is completed using the HadCM3 GCM outputs (A2 scenario) as boundary conditions. The results suggest that the significant temperature increase expected in the Carpathian Basin may considerably exceed the global warming rate. The climate of this region is expected to become wetter in winter and drier in the other seasons.