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Overly persistent circulation in climate models contributes to overestimated frequency and duration of heat waves and cold spells

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Abstract

The study examines links of summer heat waves and winter cold spells in Central Europe to atmospheric circulation and specifically its persistence in an ensemble of regional climate models (RCMs). We analyse 13 RCMs driven by the ERA-40 reanalysis and compare them against observations over reference period 1971–2000. Using objective classification of circulation types and an efficiency coefficient with a block resampling test, we identify circulation types significantly conducive to heat waves and cold spells. We show that the RCMs have a stronger tendency to group together days with very high or low temperature and tend to simulate too many heat waves and cold spells, especially those lasting 5 days and more. Circulation types conducive to heat waves in summer are characterized by anticyclonic, southerly and easterly flow, with increasing importance of warm advection during heat waves. Winter cold spells are typically associated with easterly and anticyclonic flow, and the onset of cold spells tends to be linked to northerly and cyclonic flow with cold advection. The RCMs are generally able to reproduce the links between circulation and heat waves or cold spells, including the radiation-to-advection effect for heat waves and the opposite advection-to-radiation effect for cold spells. They capture relatively well also changes of mean temperature anomalies during sequences of given circulation types, namely the tendency towards temperature increase (decrease) during those types conducive to heat waves (cold spells). Since mean lengths of all circulation supertypes are overestimated in the RCMs, we conclude that the overly persistent circulation in climate models contributes to the overestimated frequency of long heat waves and cold spells. As these biases are rather general among the examined RCMs and similar drawbacks are likely to be manifested in climate model simulations for the twenty-first century, the results also suggest that climate change scenarios for spells of days with high or low temperatures should be interpreted with a view to the models’ limitations in simulating the recent climate.

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Acknowledgments

The RCM data were obtained from the ENSEMBLES project database funded within the EU-FP6, contract number 505539. The study was supported by the Czech Science Foundation under project P209/10/2265 and by the Ministry of Education under project 7AMB15AR001. We thank Ondřej Lhotka, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Prague, for his valuable comments on the draft of the paper, and anonymous referees for suggestions that helped improve the original manuscript.

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  1. Institute of Atmospheric Physics AS CR, Boční II 1401, 141 31, Prague, Czech Republic

    Eva Plavcová & Jan Kyselý

  2. Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jan Kyselý

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  1. Eva Plavcová
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Correspondence to Eva Plavcová.

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Plavcová, E., Kyselý, J. Overly persistent circulation in climate models contributes to overestimated frequency and duration of heat waves and cold spells. Clim Dyn 46, 2805–2820 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2733-8

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