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Development and use of Regional Earth System Model over the Mediterranean and Northern Adriatic Area

Ocean Sciences, Climate

Research area

The climate modeling of the Mediterranean area is quite challenging due to the high complexity of the area in terms of topography and factors driving the dynamics of the area. Numerical tools require to take into account the complexity of the region and the strong interactions which occur between air and sea. Thus the development of the regional earth system models which encompass the high resolution and the air-sea interaction is of paramount importance.

Project goals

The project aimed at developing and testing high resolution configurations of the Regional Earth System RegCM-ES over the Northern Adriatic and Mediterranean region. Moreover together with the development of the numerical configurations of the system over the targeted domains, we aimed at producing a series of evaluation and climate projections runs in the ERA5 period and under SSP3-7.0 emission scenario.

Computational approach

Settings and running a coupled model requires high computational power. The same holds for pre-and post processing of the data resulting from the numerical simulations.

Image

Daily precipitation (in mm day-1) in the period September-November 1989-1995 according to EURO4AM (left panel), and differences (in %) between daily precipitation (in mm day-1) in the period September-November 1989-1995 simulated by RegCM (central panel) and RegCM-ES (right panel) and EURO4AM. Dots mark the points where these differences are statistically significant with p<0.05 according to the Mann-Whitney test

Key results

  1. First High resolution convection-permitting configuration of the Regional Earth System Model RegCM-ES over the Northern Adriatic region
  2. Production of long evaluation (ERA5) and climate projections (SSP3-7.0) over the Northern Adriatic for the atmospheric model RegCM5
  3. First long evaluation run and climate simulations for the convection-permitting configuration of the Regional Earth System Model RegCM-ES over the Northern Adriatic region (in production)

Resource usage

Computational activities and storage on Leonardo (partizione DCGP) and Galileo100 Cluster

What's next

Completion of the evaluation and climate projection runs. Assessing the sensitivities of the added value of the coupling to the different parametrizations and frequency of coupling between atmosphere and ocean

Image

Project image
  1. Structure of the Regional Earth System Model RegCM-ES as implemented over the Northern Adriatic region,
  2. added value of RegCM-ES (in %, with respect to the atmospheric-only model RegCM5) in simulating precipitation in Autumn. Positive values mark areas where the coupled system improves the simulation of precipitation

Marco Reale

Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale

Research at OGS where I work on the development and use of Regional Earth System Models in the Mediterranean region. I have been postdoc at ICTP and OGS, fellow at University of Salento, phd student in environmental and industrial fluid mechanics at university of Trieste. Winner of the Medclivar young scientist award and ESM young scientist award