Published in

IOP Publishing, Environmental Research Letters, 11(17), p. 114055, 2022

DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aca03a

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Convection in future winter storms over Northern Europe

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Abstract Precipitation within extratropical cyclones is very likely to increase towards the end of the century in a business-as-usual scenario. We investigate hourly precipitation changes in end-of-century winter storms with the first km-scale model ensemble covering northwest Europe and the Baltic region. This is an ensemble that explicitly represents convection (convection permitting models (CPMs)). Models agree that future winter storms will bring 10%–50% more precipitation, with the same level of light precipitation but more moderate and heavy precipitation, together with less frequent frozen precipitation. The warm sector precipitation rates will get closer (up to similar) to those in present-day autumn storms, along with higher convective available potential energy and convective inhibition, suggesting more convection embedded in storms. To the first order, mean hourly precipitation changes in winter storms are driven by temperature increase (with little relative humidity changes) and storm dynamical intensity (more uncertain), both captured by regional climate models (RCMs). The CPMs agree with this, and in addition, most CPMs show more increase in intense precipitation in the warm sector of storms compared to their parent RCM.