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In the autumn, the French Mediterranean area is frequently exposed to heavy precipitation events whose daily accumulation can exceed 300 mm. One of the key processes contributing to these precipitation amounts is the deep convection, which can be resolved explicitly by state-or-the-art convection-permitting model to reproduce heavy rainfall events that are comparable to observations. However, this approach has never been used in climate simulation for the Mediterranean coastal region. In this research, we investigate the added values of using three ensembles of climate simulations at convection-permitting resolution (approx. 3 km) in replicating extreme precipitation events in both daily and shorter time scale over the South of France. These three convection-permitting simulations are performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). They are forced by three EURO-CORDEX simulations, which are also downscaled with WRF at the resolution of 0.11° (approx. 12 km). We found that a convection-permitting approach provides a more realistic representation of extreme daily and 3-hourly rainfall simulations in comparison with EURO-CORDEX simulations. Their similarity with observations allows a use for climate change studies and its impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SCOPE Climate (Spatially COherent Probabilistic Extended Climate dataset) is a 25-member ensemble of 142-year daily high-resolution reconstructions of precipitation, temperature, and Penman–Monteith reference evapotranspiration over France, from 1 January 1871 to 29 December 2012. SCOPE Climate provides an ensemble of 25 spatially coherent gridded multivariate time series. It is derived from the statistical downscaling of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) by the SCOPE method, which is based on the analogue approach. SCOPE Climate performs well in comparison to both dependent and independent data for precipitation and temperature. The ensemble aspect corresponds to the uncertainty related to the SCOPE method. SCOPE Climate is the first century-long gridded high-resolution homogeneous dataset available over France and thus has paved the way for improving knowledge on specific past meteorological events or for improving knowledge on climate variability, since the end of the 19th century. This dataset has also been designed as a forcing dataset for long-term hydrological applications and studies of the hydrological consequences of climate variability over France. SCOPE Climate is freely available for any non-commercial use and can be downloaded as NetCDF files from 10.5281/zenodo.1299760 for precipitation, 10.5281/zenodo.1299712 for temperature, and 10.5281/zenodo.1251843 for reference evapotranspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have investigated the climate variability of specific areas in the Pyrenees. However, due to the complexity of obtaining data from three different countries, a study of the Pyrenees as a whole was still missing. Here, for the first time and under the framework of the CLIM'PY project, scientists from Spain, France and Andorra are working together to create a common temperature and precipitation database. We collected 1,495 precipitation and 1,331 temperature series of both sides of the mountain range to create: 1) a high-resolution gridded dataset (1x1 km) including daily data for the period 1981-2015; and 2) a long-term monthly dataset based on 61 temperature and 119 precipitation homogenized series for the period 1950-2015. Then, we calculated the annual, seasonal and monthly trends. Likewise, we computed a set of 27 extreme precipitation and temperature indices from the World Meteorological Organization, as well as their trends, to assess the spatial distribution and long-term variability of the climate in the Pyrenees.Overall, we discovered an increase of both annual (0.2 ºC/decade) and seasonal temperature, especially in spring and summer (0.3 ºC/decade), and a slight decrease in precipitation (-1.8 %/decade), although in general not significant and including a high spatial variability. This decrease is significant, however, in the southernmost side and can be seen in the spatial distribution of all daily and extreme indices of precipitation. This study represents the first step to assess the impacts of climate change in the whole Pyrenees, helping achieve a better management of a territory that highly depends on climate (tourism, agriculture, etc.) and with a great ecological diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]