Urban areas and urban-rural contrasts under climate change: What does the EURO-CORDEX ensemble tell us?-Investigating near surface humidity in berlin and its surroundings
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Authors
Climate change will impact urban areas. Decision makers need useful climate information to adapt adequately. This research aims to improve understanding of changes in moisture and temperature projected under climate change in Berlin compared to its surroundings. Simulations for the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario from the European Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) 0.11° are analyzed, showing a difference in moisture and temperature variables between Berlin and its surroundings. The running mean over 30 years shows a divergence throughout the twenty-first century for relative humidity between Berlin and its surroundings. Under this scenario, Berlin gets drier over time. The Mann-Kendall test quantifies a robust decreasing trend in relative humidity for the multi-model ensemble throughout the twenty-first century. The Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test for relative humidity indicates a robust climate change signal in Berlin. It is drier and warmer in Berlin compared to its surroundings for all months with the largest difference existing in summer. Additionally, the change in humidity for the period 2070-2099 compared to 1971-2000 is larger in the summer months. This study presents results to better understand near surface moisture change and related variables under long-term climate change in urban areas compared to their rural surroundings using a regional climate multi-model ensemble.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 730 |
| Journal | Atmosphere |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Number of pages | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 01.12.2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
This research received no external funding. The research was funded by the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (HZG) as a part of G.S. L's doctorate. We wish to acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Regional Climate and the Working Group on Coupled Modeling, the former coordinating body of CORDEX and the panel responsible for CMIP5. We also thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. The authors acknowledge the contributing climate modeling centers for the EURO-CORDEX simulations and for making them freely available. We also acknowledge the Earth System Grid Federation infrastructure, an international effort led by the US Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, the European Network for Earth System Modeling, and other partners in the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals (GO-ESSP). In addition, we acknowledge the contributions of the EURO-CORDEX regional climate modeling groups to the survey on urban representation in RCMs used for EURO-CORDEX 0.11? simulations. We thank R. Parks for proofreading the manuscript and providing suggestions to improve readability. We wish to acknowledge the reviewers for their valuable feedback that greatly improved the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
- Berlin, EURO-CORDEX, Humidity, Regional climate modeling, Urban climate change, Urban-rural interactions
- Environmental planning