TY  - JOUR
A1  - Flaounas, Emmanouil
A1  - Kelemen, Fanni Dóra
A1  - Wernli, Heini
A1  - Gaertner, Miguel Angel
A1  - Reale, Marco
A1  - Sanchez-Gomez, Emilia
A1  - Lionello, Piero
A1  - Calmanti, Sandro
A1  - Podrascanin, Zorica
A1  - Somot, Samuel
A1  - Akhtar, Naveed
A1  - Romera, Raquel
A1  - Conte, Dario
T1  - Assessment of an ensemble of ocean–atmosphere coupled and uncoupled regional climate models to reproduce the climatology of Mediterranean cyclones
T2  - Climate dynamics
N2  - This study aims to assess the skill of regional climate models (RCMs) at reproducing the climatology of Mediterranean cyclones. Seven RCMs are considered, five of which were also coupled with an oceanic model. All simulations were forced at the lateral boundaries by the ERA-Interim reanalysis for a common 20-year period (1989–2008). Six different cyclone tracking methods have been applied to all twelve RCM simulations and to the ERA-Interim reanalysis in order to assess the RCMs from the perspective of different cyclone definitions. All RCMs reproduce the main areas of high cyclone occurrence in the region south of the Alps, in the Adriatic, Ionian and Aegean Seas, as well as in the areas close to Cyprus and to Atlas mountains. The RCMs tend to underestimate intense cyclone occurrences over the Mediterranean Sea and reproduce 24–40 % of these systems, as identified in the reanalysis. The use of grid nudging in one of the RCMs is shown to be beneficial, reproducing about 60 % of the intense cyclones and keeping a better track of the seasonal cycle of intense cyclogenesis. Finally, the most intense cyclones tend to be similarly reproduced in coupled and uncoupled model simulations, suggesting that modeling atmosphere–ocean coupled processes has only a weak impact on the climatology and intensity of Mediterranean cyclones.
This paper is a contribution to the special issue on Med-CORDEX, an international coordinated initiative dedicated to the multi-component regional climate modelling (atmosphere, ocean, land surface, river) of the Mediterranean under the umbrella of HyMeX, CORDEX, and Med-CLIVAR and coordinated by Samuel Somot, Paolo Ruti, Erika Coppola, Gianmaria Sannino, Bodo Ahrens, and Gabriel Jordà.
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/42313
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-423139
SN  - 0930-7575
SN  - 1432-0894
N1  - © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00382-016-3398-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
VL  - 2016
SP  - 1
EP  - 18
PB  - Springer
CY  - Berlin ; Heidelberg
ER  -