Description
In a context of climate change, climate information requirements from decision makers call for a better understanding of why the Euro-Mediterranean region and, Catalonia specifically, are hotspots for both warming as well as drying signals, particularly in summer. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is currently a large range of data sources (observations, global projections, regionalized projections, sensitivity experiments, attribution experiments, etc.), which lead to discrepancies and analogies in the conclusions extracted from the different climate data sources.
An example of this is the need to explain the discrepancies between the model results in the Mediterranean area, which leads to the need to find a way to constrain the projections to come up with coherent climate information. The approach consists in comparing all the different sets of information, describing the discrepancies and analogies amongst them, and exploring the different methodologies available to generate consolidated climate change information.
Therefore, the CLIMCAT project aims to describe a 1) comprehensive view of the main physical challenges to produce credible climate change information in Catalonia; 2) the methodologies to generate consolidated climate information from different lines of evidence; and 3) the requirements to access all the climate data required.
The analysis will focus on near-surface temperature, precipitation and wind speed, but can be extended to other variables of societal relevance, and will consider the behaviour of both extremes and climate indicators.
