Partitioning uncertainty components of mean climate and climate change in a large ensemble of European regional climate model projections

Abstract A study of seasonal mean temperature, precipitation, and wind speed has been performed for a set of 19 global climate model (GCM) driven high-resolution regional climate model (RCM) simulations forming a complete 5 × 4 GCM × RCM matrix with only one missing simulation. Differences between single simulations and between groups of simulations forced by a specific GCM or a specific RCM are identified. With the help of an analysis of variance (ANOVA) we split the ensemble variance into linear GCM and RCM contributions and cross terms for both mean climate and climate change for the end of the current century according to the RCP8.5 emission scenario. The results document that the choice of GCM generally has a larger influence on the climate change signal than the choice of RCM, having a significant influence for roughly twice as many points in the area for the fields investigated (temperature, precipitation and wind speed). It is also clear that the RCM influence is generally concentrated close to the eastern and northern boundaries and in mountainous areas, i.e., in areas where the added surface detail of e.g. orography, snow and ice seen by the RCM is expected to have considerable influence on the climate, and in areas where the air in general has spent the most time within the regional domain. The analysis results in estimates of areas where the specific identity of either GCM or RCM is formally significant, hence obtaining an indication about regions, seasons, and fields where linear superpositions of GCM and RCM effects are good approximations to an actual simulation for both the mean fields analysed and their changes. In cases where linear superposition works well, the frequently encountered sparse GCM–RCM matrices may be filled with emulated results, leading to the possibility of giving more fair relative weight between model simulations than simple averaging of existing simulations. An important result of the present study is that properties of the specific GCM–RCM combination are generally important for the mean climate, but negligible for climate change for the seasonal-mean surface fields investigated here.