Assessment of the Joint Quantiles of Temperature and Precipitation in CMIP5 Future Climate Projections over Europe

The present study assesses the changes in the exceedances of the joint extremes of temperature and precipitation quantiles as well as the trend magnitude and statistical significance of these changes. Following the Beniston’s idea, the combination of cool/dry, cool/wet, warm/dry and warm/wet modes in projected future climate over Europe up to the end of the twenty first century is investigated in consistent manner. These modes are defined as excedances of fixed quantile thresholds, the lower and the upper quartile respectively. The use of joint quantiles allows an exploration of climate statistics that in many instances would be overlooked by simply analyzing single thresholds of temperature or precipitation. The used for the computation of the quantiles data for the mean 10-day temperature and 10-day precipitation sum are obtained as ensemble multi-model median from the bias-corrected output of 5 CMIP5 global models, forced with all 4 RCP emission scenarios. The model output is accessed from the section of the Inter Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project in the Copernicus Data Store. Generally, the obtained results are coherent with the consolidated outcomes of the most recent studies, considering the projected future changes of the mean temperature and the precipitation across Europe. Key finding is, however, the revealed steady and statistically significant increase of the number of the extreme warm and dry events over the whole Mediterranean basin. The consequences of such tendency could be manifold, including several adverse effects on the ecosystems as well as on managed systems (e.g., agriculture and water supply sector).