Climate is changing: Droughts, floods, and extreme weather events influence agriculture, economy, and society. Improved adaptability of industry and society to the future climate, however, requires reliable statements on medium-term climate development, in particular for certain regions. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and partners in the MiKlip project have now developed such a model that can be used to make more precise regional climate prognoses for Europe for a period of up to ten years.
What will the weather be like tomorrow or in the next two weeks? Prognoses of short-term changes of the atmosphere and seasonal forecasts are already made on a regular basis. Climate prognoses for a decade, by contrast, reflect tendencies for a medium term of up to ten years. Within the MiKlip (Medium-term Climate Prognosis) project, KIT and partners of the German Weather Service (DWD), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), Hamburg, and other universities have developed a forecast system to calculate such climate prognoses of regional resolution, i.e. for regions of 25 km in dimension.
The global climate prognoses that are refined by COSMO-CLM are based on the global climate model ECHAM of the MPI and differ from long-term projections, such as the IPCC fifth assessment report, by considering as a starting condition the “memories” of various components of the climate system: Atmosphere, ocean, land or ice mass react to external impacts, such as carbon dioxide or temperature, at different rates. For example, the atmosphere stores heat for a few days only, whereas sea ice stores heat for one to two years, and the ocean for up to 100 years.
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