In RCMs, the impact of precipitation biases becomes also apparent in large-scale studies that assess all components of regional water budgets over large European catchments 31. In addition, the observed biases exhibit seasonal and regional variability 29, just recently demonstrated in a study evaluating EURO-CORDEX ensemble members together with high-resolution GCM outputs 30. Seasonal and sub-domain biases range between − 40 and + 80% with a tendency in the long-term mean spatial bias patterns to overestimate precipitation over the central, northern, and eastern parts of the model domain and along the eastern model boundary, and an underestimation over the southern parts of Europe 28. In the more recent EURO-CORDEX RCM ensemble 27 driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis, a standard evaluation over Europe shows a wide range of precipitation biases across the different members. This behaviour has been documented over the course of multi-model ensemble projects, such as PRUDENCE 23, 24, ENSEMBLES 25, or NARCCAP 26. For example, RCMs have been used as drivers for hydrological models assessing projected future evolution of river discharge 10, 11, 12, to assess water budgets in catchment hydrology 13, 14, as input to groundwater models 15, 16, 17, in hydropower modelling 18, 19, 20, or to assess water resources 21, 22.ĭespite continuous progress over the years 4, RCMs often show precipitation biases over land areas, that significantly affect the water cycle (Fig. Over the years, many water cycle-related questions have been addressed with RCMs. In addition, RCMs are used to answer a variety of research questions 4, and generate climate change projections, e.g., as part of large multi model ensembles experiments, that form the basis for vulnerability, impact and adaptation studies 7, 8 the latest of which is the ongoing COordinated Regional Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) 9. In dynamical downscaling setups, RCMs with their higher spatial resolution can represent small-scale surface heterogeneities due to orography, coastlines, lakes, or land cover as well as mesoscale dynamical processes or extreme events in more detail than global climate models (GCMs) 6.
1, 2, 3, RCMs have undergone many advancements towards Earth system modelling in climate research, as summarized by Refs. Since the first regional climate model (RCM) simulations by Refs.
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