Climate Initiative for Iberian Mountain Areas (CIMAS): variabilidad y cambio climático en zonas de montaña con modelización regional de alta resolución espacial

Abstract

Mountain areas are particularly sensitive to global warming as they usually present a complex distribution of climates and ecosystems and feedbacks tend to amplify the effects of climate change. CIMAs is a joint effort aiming at improving our understanding of climate variability over mountain regions in Iberia. A pilot area has been selected over the Sierra de Guadarrama (Spanish Central range, about 50 km from Madrid) aiming at studying climate variability through very high (1 km) resolution simulations, exploring models’ ability to capture relevant processes at that scale. ERA Interim, ERA5 and different WRF nested simulations, spanning the last three decades and reaching 1 km resolution, have been compared to a dense network of in situ observations. Results show a clear improvement with increasing resolution for temperature, but some altitude-related biases for precipitation. In this sense, some sensitivity tests to changing convection parameterizations and to convection permitting configurations have been assessed.