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The majority of future climate projections suggest that the Mediterranean region will be one of the most prominent climate change hot-spots. But while running global atmospheric models a part of the local climate information is lost due to their coarse resolution (≈100km). Some regional scale forcing such as orography, land use (soil and vegetation properties, albedo etc.), inland water bodies and small islands are not represented adequately. To study and understand all the mechanisms and feedbacks that will contribute to these changes regionally we need to create projections of higher resolution. The most sophisticated way to address this is the dynamical downscaling technique. In more details, the output of global models can be used to force the Lateral Boundary Conditions (LBC) of a Regional Climate Model (RCM) of finer resolution, where the local weather features can be parameterized more realistically. We use two state of the art RCMs (WRF and PRECIS) to create regional climate change projections for the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, up to the end of the 21st century. In this poster we briefly present some results of work done from the regional climate group of our institute and also discuss the next steps of our research. |
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