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JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 112, D24108, doi:10.1029/2007JD008712, 2007

Regional probabilistic climate forecasts from a multithousand, multimodel ensemble of simulations

C. Piani

Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy


B. Sanderson

Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK


F. Giorgi

Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy


D. J. Frame

Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK


C. Christensen

Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy


M. R. Allen

Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK


Abstract

A methodology for constraining climate forecasts, developed for application to the multithousand member perturbed physics ensemble of simulations completed by the distributed computing project ClimatePrediction.net, is here presented in detail. The methodology is extended to produce constrained forecasts of mean surface temperature and precipitation within 21 land-based regions and is validated with climate simulations from other models available from the IPCC (AR4) data set. The mean forecasted values of temperature and precipitation largely confirm prior results for the same regions. In particular, precipitation in the Mediterranean basin is shown to decrease and temperature over northern Europe is shown to increase with comparatively little uncertainty in the forecast (i.e., with tight constraints). However, in some cases the forecasts show large uncertainty, and there are a few cases where the forecasts cannot be constrained at all. These results illustrate the effectiveness of the methodology and its applicability to regional climate variables.

Received 28 March 2007; accepted 19 September 2007; published 27 December 2007.

Keywords: regional; climate; probabilistic.

Index Terms: 1637 Global Change: Regional climate change; 1694 Global Change: Instruments and techniques; 1626 Global Change: Global climate models (3337, 4928); 1620 Global Change: Climate dynamics (0429, 3309).

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Citation: Piani, C., B. Sanderson, F. Giorgi, D. J. Frame, C. Christensen, and M. R. Allen (2007), Regional probabilistic climate forecasts from a multithousand, multimodel ensemble of simulations, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24108, doi:10.1029/2007JD008712.