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Understanding the future patterns of precipitation behaviour in unique geographical areas, largely determined by their orography and local scale, can help lay the foundations for a new precipitation model for the design of the city's main urban drainage infrastructures (intensity-duration-frequency curves, mathematical functions that relate precipitation intensity to duration and frequency of occurrence, hereafter IDF, for the short-, medium- and long-term future). This will definitely contribute to the improvement of the city's resilience to the effects of climate change. In this paper, the projections of a subset of climate change models from both the sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6; with a total of 5 simulations) and Euro-CORDEX (for a set of 51 simulations) have been adjusted to the municipality of Alicante (in the southeast of Spain), using the Climadjust tool (climadjust.com). These projections contain different climatic variables. The rainfall variable has been used to derive a new framework of boundary conditions to help design more resilient infrastructure for torrential rainfall events and urban flooding. The projections corresponding to three climate change scenarios (CMIP6: SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP5-8.5; and Euro-CORDEX: RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5) are considered with daily resolution and, by applying statistical techniques of temporal disaggregation (by means of a cascade model), hourly (and sub-hourly, reaching 30-min resolution) disaggregation. The results at hourly and 30-min resolutions are used to construct IDF curves of future climate, grouped into short-term (years 2015 to 2040), medium-term (years 2041 to 2070) and long-term (years 2071 to 2100) sub-scenarios. The selected future climate IDFs for an adverse climate change scenario (SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5) show increases in rainfall intensities, higher the shorter the rainfall duration, for return periods greater than or equal to 25 years, whereas for return periods under 25 years the current IDFs can be representative of future scenarios. Current calculations and future projection of the torrentiality index for severe climate change scenarios, as well as the climate change factors, show an increase in the frequency and magnitude of the heaviest rainfall. This fact corroborates the hypotheses of greater general torrentiality in future rainfall in this specific area of the Spanish Mediterranean coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain is one of the European countries with most environmental problems related to water scarcity and droughts. Additionally, several studies suggest trends of increasing temperature and decreasing rainfall, mainly for the Iberian Peninsula, due to climate variability and change. While Regional Climate Models (RCM) are a valuable tool for understanding climate processes, the causes and plausible impacts on variables and meteorological extremes present a wide range of associated uncertainties. The multi-model ensemble approach allows the quantification and reduction of uncertainties in the predictions. The combination of models (RCM in this case), generally increases the reliability of the predictions, although there are different weighting methodologies. In this paper, a strategy is presented for the building of non-stationary PDF (probability density functions) ensembles with the aim of evaluating the spatial pattern of future risk of drought for an area. At the same time, the uncertainty associated with the metric used in the construction of the PDF ensembles is assessed. A comparative study of methodologies based on the application of the Reliability Ensemble Averaging (REA), assessing its factors using two performance measures, on the one hand the Perkins Score Methods, on the other hand the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, is proposed. The evaluation of the sensitivity of the methodologies used in the construction of ensembles, as proposed in this paper, although without completely eliminating uncertainty, allows a better understanding of the sources and magnitude of the uncertainties involved. Despite the differences between the spatial distribution results from each metric (which can be in the order of 40 % in some areas), both approaches concluded about a plausible significant and widespread increase throughout continental Spain of the mean value of annual maximum dry spell lengths (AMDSL) between the years 1990 and 2050. Finally, the more parsimonious approach in the building of ensembles PDF, based on AMDSL in peninsular Spain, is identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high variability of the Mediterranean climate from year to year and within each year makes it difficult to assess changes that could be associated with a climate change. In this paper some indices, such as changes in the precipitation concentration during the year, maximum 1-day and 5-day precipitation, number of wet days (total and those with precipitation higher than the 75th and 95th percentile), magnitude and frequency of extreme events (considered as the rainfall higher than that corresponding to the 99th percentile), fraction of annual total precipitation due to events exceeding the 95th and 99th percentile, strength of the events, and length and frequency of dry period (days between consecutive rains) are evaluated for the Penedès-Anoia region (NE Spain). A 80-year daily dataset (1923-2002) and two 40-year series were used to assess possible trends. The indices indicate an increase in precipitation in winter and summer and a positive trend of concentration in autumn, with a higher number of extreme events separated by longer dry periods. The total number of wet days per year increased, although it was irregularly distributed over the year, with an increase in the extremes and in the fraction of total rainfall that these events represent in autumn and winter, and with an increase of the strength of the events in autumn. These changes in rainfall distribution have negative effects on water availability for crops and contribute to accelerate erosion processes in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper lies in the identification of possible significant linear trends at monthly, seasonal and annual timescales in the Mediterranean during the second half of the 20th century. Monthly and daily records of 63 stations have been used to elaborate several precipitation indices: sum of daily precipitation (SDP) for rainfall >0.1 mm, >10 mm and >95th percentile, of number of rainy days (RD) >0.1 mm and >10 mm and of mean daily precipitation (MDP) >0.1 mm and >10 mm. For each index the stations have been gathered together by Rotated Principal Component Analyses to determine 8 sub-areas which can be considered as identical for all the timescales at the spatial scale of the research. Trends have been estimated from the scores of each eigenvector retained in all RPCAs. They are mainly non existant or non significant decreasing, even if a few monthly trends appear to be significantly diminishing, primarily during winter months, March in the Atlantic region, October in the Mediterranean Spain, December in the Lions and Genoa Gulfs, January, winter and the year in Greece, winter and the year in Italy and winter in the Near East and increasing in April in the two gulfs. Correlation coefficients between SDP>0.1 mm and other indices have been computed: the significant trends seem mainly related to RD>10 mm, which represents a high percentage of the total rainfall amount. Greece is remarkable: SDP>0.1 mm and >10 mm decrease significantly during January, winter, the rainy season and the entire year whereas SDP>95th percentile increases significantly, in accordance with the climatic change scenarios for the end of this century as does the decreasing of the total monthly and seasonal rainfall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]