Regional climate simulations for the impact of climate change over the CAS-CORDEX domain

The AFTER project was initiated to investigate the “Impact of climate change and climate extremes on the Agriculture and Forestry in the Europe-Russia-Turkey Region”. In this context high-resolution climate data was produced by running the RCMs ALARO-0 and REMO at a resolution of 25 km over the Central Asia (CAS)-CORDEX domain. The models were evaluated by comparing the output of ERA-Interim driven runs with CRU data over the 1980-2017 period. Different climate variables that will be used later as input for crop and vegetation models are validated. First validation results show that both RCMs reproduce realistic spatial patterns for temperature and precipitation, with biases in an acceptable range. Similar precipitation biases appear for both models with a strong wet winter bias in the east and a dry summer bias in the south-western part of the CAS-CORDEX domain. In contrast, there are differences between the RCMs in terms of spatial bias patterns for air temperature. For both variables large biases are observed over the mountainous areas but these could be largely attributed to the observational error. The climate change results over the CAS-CORDEX domain using CMIP5 driven simulations enable an assessment of climate impacts and extreme events. The REMO model is driven by three GCMs (MPIESM, HadGEM and NorESM), while ALARO is driven by CNMR-CM5. The comparison of the historical period with the future model output up to 2100 allows to estimate the response of the climate over Central Asia under the scenarios RCP2.6, RCP4.5 (only for ALARO) and RCP8.5. The AFTER consortium bridges the gap between supply and demand of climate information by implementing the newly created climate data directly into crop and vegetation models. For specific sub-regions of Latvia, Turkey and major crop areas of Russia detailed studies will be done. In addition stakeholders from different countries in the CAS-CORDEX domain are involved in discussing the scientific results