Assessing observational constraints on future European climate in an out-of-sample framework
OPEN ACCESS
Loading...
Author / Producer
Date
2024
Publication Type
Journal Article
ETH Bibliography
yes
Citations
Altmetric
OPEN ACCESS
Data
Rights / License
Abstract
Observations are increasingly used to constrain multi-model projections for future climate assessments. This study assesses the performance of five constraining methods, which have previously been applied to attempt to improve regional climate projections from CMIP5-era models. We employ an out-of-sample testing approach to assess the efficacy of these constraining methods when applied to "pseudo-observational" datasets to constrain future changes in the European climate. These pseudo-observations are taken from CMIP6 simulations, for which future changes were withheld and used for verification. The constrained projections are more accurate and broadly more reliable for regional temperature projections compared to the unconstrained projections, especially in the summer season, which was not clear prior to this study. However, the constraining methods do not improve regional precipitation projections. We also analysed the performance of multi-method projections by combining the constrained projections, which are found to be competitive with the best-performing individual methods and demonstrate improvements in reliability for some temperature projections. The performance of the multi-method projection highlights the potential of combining constraints for the development of constraining methods.
Permanent link
Publication status
published
External links
Editor
Book title
Journal / series
Volume
7 (1)
Pages / Article No.
95
Publisher
Nature
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
Climate and Earth system modelling; Climate sciences; Projection and prediction
Organisational unit
03777 - Knutti, Reto / Knutti, Reto
Notes
Funding
776613 - European Climate Prediction System (EC)