Projected changes in mean annual cycle of temperature and precipitation over the Czech Republic: Comparison of CMIP5 and CMIP6

Abstract

The multi-model ensembles like CMIP5 or CMIP6 provide a tool to analyze structural uncertainty of climate simulations. Currently developed regional and local climate change scenarios for the Czech Republic assess the uncertainty based on state-of-the-art Global Climate Model (GCM) and Regional Climate Model (RCM) ensembles. Present study focuses on multi-model spread of projected changes in long-term monthly means and inter-annual variability of monthly mean minimum, mean and maximum daily air temperature and monthly mean precipitation. We concentrate in more detail on the simulation of CNRM-ESM2-1, the driving GCM for the convection permitting ALADIN-Climate/CZ simulation contributing to the local scenarios in very high resolution. For this GCM, we also analyze a mini-ensemble with perturbed initial conditions to evaluate the range of internal climate variability. The results for the Czech Republic reveal minor differences in model performance in the reference period whereas quite substantial inter-generation shift in projected future change towards higher air temperature and lower summer precipitation in CMIP6 comparing to CMIP5. One of the prominent features across GCM generations is the pattern of summer precipitation decrease over central Europe. Further, projected air temperature increase is higher in summer and autumn than in winter and spring, implying increase of thermal continentality of climate. On the other hand, slight increase of winter precipitation and tendency towards decrease of summer precipitation lead to projected decrease of ombric continentality. The end of 21st century projections also imply higher probability of dry summer periods, higher precipitation amounts in the cold half of the year and extremely high temperature in summer. Regarding the CNRM-ESM2-1, it is often quite far from the multi-model median. Therefore, we strictly recommend to accompany any analysis based on the simulation of nested Aladin-CLIMATE/CZ with proper uncertainty estimate. The range of uncertainty connected to internal climate variability based on one GCM is often quite large in comparison to the range of whole CMIP6 ensemble. It implies that when constructing climate change scenarios for the Central Europe region, attention should be paid not only to structural uncertainty represented by inter-model differences and scenario uncertainty, but also to the influence of internal climate variability.