Changes in event soil moisture-temperature coupling can intensify very extreme heat beyond expectations.

The most disastrous heatwaves are very extreme events with return periods of hundreds of years, but traditionally, climate research has focussed on moderate extreme events occurring every couple of years or even several times within a year. Here, we use three Earth System Model large ensembles to assess whether very extreme heat events respond differently to global warming than moderate extreme events. We find that the warming signal of very extreme heat can be amplified or dampened substantially compared to moderate extremes.

Climate projections for glacier change modelling over the Himalayas.

Glaciers are of key importance to freshwater supplies in the Himalayan region. Their growth or decline is among other factors determined by an interaction of 2-m air temperature (TAS) and precipitation rate (PR) and thereof derived positive degree days (PDD) and snow and ice accumulation (SAC). To investigate determining factors in climate projections, we use a model ensemble consisting of 36 CMIP5 general circulation models (GCMs) and 13 regional climate models (RCMs) of two Asian CORDEX domains for two different representative concentration pathways (RCP4.

Blocking representation in the ERA-Interim driven EURO-CORDEX RCMs.

While Regional Climate Models (RCMs) have been shown to yield improved simulations compared to General Circulation Model (GCM), their representation of large-scale phenomena like atmospheric blocking has been hardly addressed. Here, we evaluate the ability of RCMs to simulate blocking situations present in their reanalysis driving data and analyse the associated impacts on anomalies and biases of European 2-m air temperature (TAS) and precipitation rate (PR). Five RCM runs stem from the EURO-CORDEX ensemble while three RCMs are WRF models with different nudging realizations, all of them driven by ERA-Interim for the period 1981-2010.