Evaluation and comparison of regional climate models over the Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

Different relations between parameters involved in both water and energy land surface budgets are computed from daily ERA-Interim data for the months of July and November(representative of the dry and wet season) in the period 1989-2008 over an area within the Iberian Península covering most of Tajo and Guadiana basins (from 40.5N to 37.5N, and from 7.0W to 2.0W). The main objective of this work is to use the obtained relations for the evaluation and comparison of regional climate models (RCMs) participating in the ENSEMBLES project. This approach was first proposed by Betts (2004) for comparing and evaluating global climate models. He proposed the assessment of model surface components as a system with widely connected components. In this way, models are compared among themselves and evaluated against observational data. The work is mainly focused on the goodness of the representation of physical surface processes and their feedbacks. The obtained relationships among different parameters are therefore considered as imposed restrictions by physical processes which can be used to evaluate RCMs.