Projekt Members

Institut für Meteorologie und Klimaforschung,
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Prof. Dr. Christoph Kottmeier
Prof. Dr. Joaquim Pinto
Hendrik Feldmann
Dr. Gerd Schädler
Dr. Hans-Jürgen Panitz
Dr. Marcus Breil

Deutscher Wetterdienst
Dr. Barbara Früh

Institut für Atmosphäre und Umwelt
Goethe Universität Frankfurt/Main
Prof. Dr. Bodo Ahrens

Institut für Geographie,
Universität Würzburg (UW)
Prof. Dr. Heiko Paeth

Overview Module C: Regionalisation

MiKlip II is a follow-up project of MiKlip (Mittelfristige Klima-Prognosen, Decadal Climate Predictions, see: link). Whereas MiKlip investigated the feasability of a decadal ensemble prediction system, MiKlip II aims to improve this system, to exploit the predictive skill and implement an operational prediction system at DWD.

Within MiKlip, some predictive skill was found for multi-year climate anomalies several years ahead, with the highest skill over oceanic regions, especially the Northern Atlantic. But most users are more interested in reliable predictions over land and there, they need high resolution information, as provided by regional downscaling.

In MiKlip II, the resolution of the global prediction system, based on the earth-system model MPI-ESM, is increased.

The regional part of the prediction system is coordinated by IMK-TRO of KIT and focusses on downscaling of the global decadal predictions over Europe using the regional climate model COSMO-CLM.

There are three major research objectives planned for MiKlip II Module C:

1. Improve the COSMO-CLM towards a regional earth-system model. The focus here is on two main components of the regional climate system, which showed promising potential during the first phase of MiKlip:
   • Implementation and testing a coupled regional ocean model for the marginal seas around Europe (by GUF)
   • Inclusion of more sophisticated soil-vegetation atmosphere transfer scheme (SVAT) into the prediction system. This work package is conducted by KIT.
2. Examine the application potential of regional decadal predictions and the relevant process behind decadal predictability over Europe. There are three work packages on these topics:
   • Study the skill and added value of the regionalisation for user relevant climate parameters (KIT).
   • Examine large climate regional climate anomalies, their impact and predictability over Europe (DWD and KIT)
   • The long-term variability of the climate system is influenced by the green-house gas trends as well as the multi-decadal variability of ocean circulation - like the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which has a period of about 65 – 70 years. To better separate these two different mechanisms decadal predictions will be performed over the whole 20^th century (by GUF and KIT)
3. Generation and optimization of regional decadal prediction ensembles. Here three main topics are addressed:
   • Post-processing of regional decadal predictions to improve the results of the raw simulation ensembles towards a reliable forecast (UW, KIT)
   • Improve the composition of the ensemble with respect to predictive skill as well as computational efficiency (UW, KIT)
   • Generation of the regional ensemble predictions and identification of the optimal configuration (KIT, DWD)