Elevation-dependent biases of raw and bias-adjusted EURO-CORDEX regional climate models in the European Alps

Abstract Data from the EURO-CORDEX ensemble of regional climate model simulations and the CORDEX-Adjust dataset were evaluated over the European Alps using multiple gridded observational datasets. Biases, which are here defined as the difference between models and observations, were assessed as a function of the elevation for different climate indices that span average and extreme conditions. Moreover, we assessed the impact of different observational datasets on the evaluation, including E-OBS, APGD, and high-resolution national datasets. Furthermore, we assessed the bi-variate dependency of temperature and precipitation biases, their temporal evolution, and the impact of different bias adjustment methods and bias adjustment reference datasets. Biases in seasonal temperature, seasonal precipitation, and wet-day frequency were found to increase with elevation. Differences in temporal trends between RCMs and observations caused a temporal dependency of biases, which could be removed by detrending both observations and RCMs. The choice of the reference observation datasets used for bias adjustment turned out to be more relevant than the choice of the bias adjustment method itself. Consequently, climate change assessments in mountain regions need to pay particular attention to the choice of observational dataset and, furthermore, to the elevation dependence of biases and the increasing observational uncertainty with elevation in order to provide robust information on future climate.