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Abstract:
The variability of European summer climate is expected
to increase in the next century due to increasing levels of
atmospheric greenhouse gases, likely resulting in more
frequent and more extreme droughts and heatwaves.
However, climate models diverge on the magnitude of these
processes, due to land-surface coupling processes which are
difficult to simulate, and poorly constrained by observations.
Here we use gridded observation-based sensible heat fluxes
to constrain climate change predictions from an ensemble of
15 regional climate models. Land heat flux observations
suggest that temperature projections may be underestimated
by up to 1K regionally in Central to Northern Europe, while
slightly overestimated over the Mediterranean and Balkan
regions. The use of observation-based heat flux data
allows significant reductions in uncertainty as expressed
by the model ensemble spread of temperature for the 2071–2100 period. Maximal reduction is obtained over France and the Balkan with values locally reaching 40%.
