Explore the vast range of titles available.

The Mediterranean is expected to be one of the most prominent and vulnerable climate change “hotspots” of the twenty-first century, and the physical mechanisms underlying this finding are still not clear. Furthermore, complex interactions and feedbacks involving ocean–atmosphere–land–biogeochemical processes play a prominent role in modulating the climate and environment of the Mediterranean region on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, it is critical to provide robust climate change information for use in vulnerability–impact–adaptation assessment studies considering the Mediterranean as a fully coupled environmental system. The Mediterranean Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (Med-CORDEX) initiative aims at coordinating the Mediterranean climate modeling community toward the development of fully coupled regional climate simulations, improving all relevant components of the system from atmosphere and ocean dynamics to land surface, hydrology, and biogeochemical processes. The primary goals of Med-CORDEX are to improve understanding of past climate variability and trends and to provide more accurate and reliable future projections, assessing in a quantitative and robust way the added value of using high-resolution and coupled regional climate models. The coordination activities and the scientific outcomes of Med-CORDEX can produce an important framework to foster the development of regional Earth system models in several key regions worldwide.

The objective of this paper is to understand how large-scale processes, cloud cover and surface fluxes affect the temperature variability over the SIRTA site, near Paris, and in a regional climate simulation performed in the frame of HyMeX/Med-CORDEX programs. This site is located in a climatic transitional area where models usually show strong dispersions despite the significant influence of large scale on interannual variability due to its western location. At seasonal time scale, the temperature is mainly controlled by surface fluxes. In the model, the transition from radiation to soil moisture limited regime occurs earlier than in observations leading to an overestimate of summertime temperature. An overestimate of shortwave radiation (SW), consistent with a lack of low clouds, enhances the soil dryness. A simulation with a wet soil is used to better analyse the relationship between dry soil and clouds but while the wetter soil leads to colder temperature, the cloud cover during daytime is not increased due to the atmospheric stability. At shorter time scales, the control of surface radiation becomes higher. In the simulation, higher temperatures are associated with higher SW. A wet soil mitigates the effect of radiation due to modulation by evaporation. In observations, the variability of clouds and their effect on SW is stronger leading to a nearly constant mean SW when sorted by temperature quantile but a stronger impact of cloud cover on day-to-day temperature variability. Impact of cloud albedo effect on precipitation is also compared.

Heatwaves (HWs) are high-impact phenomena stressing both societies and ecosystems. Their intensity and frequency are expected to increase in a warmer climate over many regions of the world. While these impacts can be wide-ranging, they are potentially influenced by local to regional features such as topography, land cover, and urbanization. Here, we leverage recent advances in the very high-resolution modelling required to elucidate the impacts of heatwaves at these fine scales. Further, we aim to understand how the new generation of km-scale regional climate models (RCMs) modulates the representation of heatwaves over a well-known climate change hot spot. We analyze an ensemble of 15 convection-permitting regional climate model (CPRCM, ~ 2–4 km grid spacing) simulations and their driving, convection-parameterized regional climate model (RCM, ~ 12–15 km grid spacing) simulations from the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on Convection. The focus is on the evaluation experiments (2000–2009) and three subdomains with a range of climatic characteristics. During HWs, and generally in the summer season, CPRCMs exhibit warmer and drier conditions than their driving RCMs. Higher maximum temperatures arise due to an altered heat flux partitioning, with daily peaks up to ~ 150 W/m 2 larger latent heat in RCMs compared to the CPRCMs. This is driven by a 5–25% lower soil moisture content in the CPRCMs, which is in turn related to longer dry spell length (up to double). It is challenging to ascertain whether these differences represent an improvement. However, a point-scale distribution-based maximum temperature evaluation, suggests that this CPRCMs warmer/drier tendency is likely more realistic compared to the RCMs, with ~ 70% of reference sites indicating an added value compared to the driving RCMs, increasing to 95% when only the distribution right tail is considered. Conversely, a CPRCMs slight detrimental effect is found according to the upscaled grid-to-grid approach over flat areas. Certainly, CPRCMs enhance dry conditions, with knock-on implications for summer season temperature overestimation. Whether this improved physical representation of HWs also has implications for future changes is under investigation.

In this study, we are interested in evaluating the potential improvement of: (i) coupled RCM simulations (with the Mediterranean sea) in comparison with atmosphere only (stand-alone) RCM simulations and (ii) RCM simulations at a finer resolution in comparison with coarser resolution. For that, three different RCMs (WRF, ALADIN, LMDZ4) were run, forced by ERA-Interim reanalyses, within the HyMeX/Med-CORDEX experiments. For each RCM, different versions (coupled/stand-alone, high/low resolution) were realized. This study focuses on extreme meteorological events (hot days, droughts and heavy precipitation) and evaluates the current RCM simulations in terms of return levels associated with these events. Additionally, a large set of indicators is proposed in order to better understand the performances of RCM simulations. These indicators were applied for three variables (daily precipitation amount, mean daily 2-m air temperature and dry spell length). Results show that the differences between coupled and stand-alone RCMs are localized very near the Mediterranean sea. For hot days and droughts statistics, high resolution runs display better performances than low resolution runs. The expected improvement for extreme precipitation with higher resolution runs was not observed in this study.

The advancement of computational resources has allowed researchers to run convection-permitting regional climate model (CPRCM) simulations. A pioneering effort promoting a multimodel ensemble of such simulations is the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS) on “Convective Phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean” over an extended Alps region. In this study, the Distribution Added Value metric is used to determine the improvement of the representation of all available FPS hindcast simulations for the daily mean near-surface wind speed. The analysis is performed on normalized empirical probability distributions and considers station observation data as the reference. The use of a normalized metric allows for spatial comparison among the different regions (coast and inland), altitudes and seasons. This approach permits a direct assessment of the added value between the CPRCM simulations against their global driving reanalysis (ERA-Interim) and respective coarser resolution regional model counterparts. In general, the results show that CPRCMs add value to their global driving reanalysis or forcing regional model, due to better-resolved topography or through better representation of ocean-land contrasts. However, the nature and magnitude of the improvement in the wind speed representation vary depending on the model, the season, the altitude, or the region. Among seasons, the improvement is usually larger in summer than winter. CPRCMs generally display gains at low and medium-range altitudes. In addition, despite some shortcomings in comparison to ERA-Interim, which can be attributed to the assimilation of wind observations on the coast, the CPRCMs outperform the coarser regional climate models, both along the coast and inland.

In this paper we characterize the seasonal and inter-annual variabilities of cloud fraction profiles in both observations and simulation since they are critical to better assess the impact of clouds on climate variability. The spaceborne lidar onboard CALIPSO, providing cloud vertical profiles since 2006, is used together with a 23-year WRF simulation at 20 km resolution. A lidar simulator helps to compare consistently model with observations. The bias in observations due to the satellite under-sampling is first estimated. Then we examine the vertical variability of both occurrence and properties of clouds. It results that observations indicate a similar occurrence of low and high clouds over continent, and more high than low clouds over the sea except in summer. The simulation shows an overestimate (underestimate) of high (low) clouds comparing to observations, especially in summer. However the seasonal variability of cloud vertical profiles is well captured by WRF. Concerning inter-annual variability, observations show that in winter, those of high clouds is twice the low clouds one, an order of magnitude that is is well simulated. In summer, the observed inter-annual variability is vertically more homogeneous while the model still simulates more variability for high clouds than for low clouds. The good behavior of the simulation in winter allows us to use the 23 years of simulation and 8 years of observations to estimate the time period required to characterize the natural variability of the cloud fraction profile in winter, i.e. the time period required to detect significant anomalies and trends.

This paper analyzes the impact of cyclones to the atmospheric components on the Mediterranean Sea Water Budget, namely the cyclones contribution to precipitation and evaporation over the Mediterranean Sea. Three regional simulations were performed with the WRF model for the period 1989–2008. The model was run (1) as a standalone model, (2) coupled with the oceanic model NEMO-MED12 and (3) forced by the smoothed Sea Surface Temperature (SST) fields from the second simulation. Cyclones were tracked in all simulations, and their contribution to the total rainfall and evaporation was quantified. Results show that cyclones are mainly associated with extreme precipitation, representing more than 50 % of the annual rainfall over the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, we found that cyclone-induced evaporation represents only a small fraction of the annual total, except in winter, when the most intense Mediterranean cyclones take place. Despite the significant contribution of cyclones to rainfall, our results show that there is a balance between cyclone-induced rainfall and evaporation, suggesting a weak net impact of cyclones on the Mediterranean Sea water budget. The sensitivity of our results with respect to rapid SST changes during the development of cyclones was also investigated. Both rainfall and evaporation are affected in correlation with the SST response to the atmosphere. In fact, air feedbacks to the Mediterranean Sea during the cyclones occurrence were shown to cool down the SST and consequently to reduce rainfall and evaporation at the proximity of cyclone centers.

This study investigates the means, variability, and trends in integrated water vapour (IWV) from two modern reanalyses (ERA-Interim and MERRA-2) from 1980 to 2016 and ground-based GPS data from 1995 to 2010. It is found that the mean distributions and inter-annual variability in IWV in the reanalyses and GPS are consistent, even in regions of strong gradients. ERA-Interim is shown to exhibit a slight moist bias in the extra-tropics and a slight dry bias in the tropics (both on the order of 0.5 to 1 kg m−2) compared to GPS. ERA-Interim is also generally drier than MERRA-2 over the ocean and within the tropics. Differences in variability and trends are pointed out at a few GPS sites. These differences can be due to representativeness errors (for sites located in coastal regions and regions of complex topography), gaps and inhomogeneities in the GPS series (due to equipment changes), or potential inhomogeneities in the reanalyses (due to changes in the observing system). Trends in IWV and surface temperature in ERA-Interim and MERRA-2 are shown to be consistent, with positive IWV trends generally correlated with surface warming, but MERRA-2 presents a more general global moistening trend compared to ERA-Interim. Inconsistent trends are found between the two reanalyses over Antarctica and most of the Southern Hemisphere, and over central and northern Africa. The uncertainty in current reanalyses remains quite high in these regions, where few in situ observations are available, and the spread between models is generally important. Inter-annual and decadal variations in IWV are also shown to be strongly linked with variations in the atmospheric circulation, especially in arid regions, such as northern Africa and Western Australia, which add uncertainty in the trend estimates, especially over the shorter period. In these regions, the Clausius–Clapeyron scaling ratio is found not to be a good humidity proxy for inter-annual variability and decadal trends.

In this randomized trial, women 65 years of age or older who had osteopenia received four infusions of zoledronate or normal saline at 18-month intervals. Zoledronate was associated with a significantly lower risk of fragility fractures than placebo.

Combining vertically resolved lidar retrievals of water vapor and cloud detection, we document a 2‐day subtropical cirrus case study over La Réunion (20.9°S–55.5°E) in March 2005, focusing on the conditions of ice supersaturation inside and near the observed cloud. Using satellite observations, we describe the synoptic conditions leading to cloud formation. Supersaturation occurs 25% of the time within the cirrus, up to 35% in its middle segment, where relative humidity goes beyond 150%. In clear‐sky areas, relative humidity stays consistently low, especially in profiles without clouds. High‐troposphere atmospheric waves could initiate the formation of supersaturation conditions, especially on 16 March.