Assessing observational constraints on future European climate in an out-of-sample framework

O'Reilly, C. H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8630-1650, Brunner, L., Qasmi, S., Nogherotto, R., Ballinger, A. P., Booth, B., Befort, D. J., Knutti, R., Schurer, A. P., Ribes, A., Weisheimer, A., Coppola, E. and McSweeney, C. (2024) Assessing observational constraints on future European climate in an out-of-sample framework. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 7. 95. ISSN 2397-3722 doi: 10.1038/s41612-024-00648-8

Abstract/Summary

Observations are increasingly used to constrain multi-model projections for future climate assessments. This study assesses the performance of five constraining methods, which have previously been applied to attempt to improve regional climate projections from CMIP5-era models. We employ an out-of-sample testing approach to assess the efficacy of these constraining methods when applied to “pseudo-observational” datasets to constrain future changes in European climate. These pseudo-observations are taken from CMIP6 simulations, for which future changes were withheld and used for verification. The constrained projections are more accurate and broadly more reliable for regional temperature projections compared to the unconstrained projections, especially in the summer season, which was not clear prior to this study. However, the constraining methods do not improve regional precipitation projections. We also analysed the performance of multi-method projections, by combining the constrained projections, which are found to be competitive with the best performing individual methods and demonstrate improvements in reliability for some temperature projections. The performance of the multi-method projection highlights the potential of combining constraints for the development of constraining methods.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/116141
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
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