Refining multi-model projections of temperature extremes by evaluation against land&ndash;atmosphere coupling diagnostics

Sippel, Sebastian; Zscheischler, Jakob; Mahecha, Miguel D.; Orth, Rene; Reichstein, Markus; Vogel, Martha; Seneviratne, Sonia I.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-8-387-2017

Articles | Volume 8, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-8-387-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-8-387-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 8, issue 2

Research article

|

31 May 2017

Research article |

| 31 May 2017

Refining multi-model projections of temperature extremes by evaluation against land–atmosphere coupling diagnostics

Sebastian Sippel, Jakob Zscheischler, Miguel D. Mahecha, Rene Orth, Markus Reichstein, Martha Vogel, and Sonia I. Seneviratne

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-8-387-2017-supplement

Data sets

NCEP Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) 6-hourly Products, January 1979 to December 2010. Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory S. Saha et al. http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds093.0/

LandFlux-EVAL S. I. Seneviratne and M. Hirschi http://www.iac.ethz.ch/group/land-climate-dynamics/research/landflux-eval.html

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Short summary

The present study (1) evaluates land–atmosphere coupling in the CMIP5 multi-model ensemble against an ensemble of benchmarking datasets and (2) refines the model ensemble using a land–atmosphere coupling diagnostic as constraint. Our study demonstrates that a considerable fraction of coupled climate models overemphasize warm-season moisture-limited climate regimes in midlatitude regions. This leads to biases in daily-scale temperature extremes, which are alleviated in a constrained ensemble.