Validation of ELPIS 1980-2010 baseline scenarios using the observed European Climate Assessment data set

Global climate models (GCMs) are state-of-the-art tools used to predict the evolution of the Earth's climate system (Meehl et al. 2007). However, the direct use of climate projections from GCMs for local assessments of climate change impacts is problematic because of the coarse spatial resolution, which results in significant errors, biases and large uncer-tainty in their output at a local scale, particularly for precipitation (Knutti 2008,