Assessment of Regional Climate Change Impacts on the Water Cycle in Luxembourg and Neighbouring Regions - CLIMPACT
Institution
CRP Gabriel Lippmann
Partenaire(s) :
University of Trier (Dept. of Philology) ,
Monash University, Victoria (Australie) ,
European Academy, Bolzano (I) ,
University of Bayreuth (D)
Du : 01/05/2010
Au : 30/04/2012
Budget : 391 000,00€
Contact(s) :
Görgen Klaus
Summary
The general objective of the CLIMPACT research project is the assessment of regional climate change impacts on the water cycle in Luxembourg and neighbouring areas. The project has two main research topics and associated themes: (1) A comprehensive regional climate change assessment with a focus on hydrometeorology forms the baseline of the project as existing climate change studies for Luxembourg and its vicinity rely either on limited datasets or have a scope mainly on hydrological responses. We plan to mainly use existing regional climate model (RCM) data from the ENSEMBLES project in this first part of the study.
The ensemble of more than 20 available model runs allows for a quantification of the uncertainties inherent in the derived climate diagnostics. (2) RCMs with common resolutions of e.g. 25 km in the long transient ENSEMBLES climate change simulations do not explicitly capture the effects of small-scale surface heterogeneity. Vegetation and soil properties and the associated interactions (momentum, energy and water vapour transfers) cannot be captured well by the sub-grid-scale parameterisations. Very high-resolution (down to 1 km) longer RCM simulations that provide a possibility to capture specific local impacts of climate change are still very rare.
To close this gap, and have improved model results (e.g. summertime precipitation) for a variety of uses by fellow researches and stakeholders alike, we intend to set up a multi-model dynamical downscaling framework where we run two RCMs down to resolutions of 1 km for time slices of validation, control and future time spans for the “Grande Région” and Luxembourg. Water cycle processes simulation should improve (i.e. precipitation, evapotranspiration (ET), interception, runoff, soil water, ground water recharge). Also, we might gain further insights into the surface-atmosphere coupling. Hence, overall the project shall deliver a comprehensive analysis of the climate change impacts on the water cycle in the Grande Région and Luxembourg.