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Project partners: Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Ökologie, Sternwartestr. 15, 6020 Innsbruck , Austria.
Function of the Project Partner: Partner

BOKU Research Units: Institute of Meteorology and Climatology; Institute of Sustainable Economic Development

Funded by: Austrian Institute of Economic Research, Arsenal, Objekt 20, A-1103 Wien, Austria

Abstract: Global Climate Models (GCMs) are producing reliable results on future climate conditons for at global scales and for continents (Randall et al. 2007). Regional climate models (RCMs) have been established in recent years (Giorgi 2006). Currently RCMs produce results at scales of 25 km in Europe (Murphy et al. 2004), for alpine regions the grid is 10 km (Jacob 2006, Beck et al. 2007). Statistical downscaling is needed to establish a link between signals of regional climate change and local conditions. Methods that have been developed for seasonal weather forecasts, more recently have been used for projections of climate change in the near future. Such methods give more reliable results than REMo/UBA forecasts (Prettenthaler et al. 2007). Currently there are too few evaluation results at regional scales and the validity of their forecasts in Alpine regions has not yet been confirmed.
A comparable simple approach for scenarios in the near future uses trends based on observations during the last decades. Trends reflect very local conditions and carry information of recent climate signals. Forecasts based on trends should give reliable results until 2030. In this project module an evaluation will be made whether downscaling approaches (GCM-RCM-statistical downscaling) or trend scenarios will give better results for the purposes needed in the other tasks (in particular for
the bio-physical process analysis module).

Keywords: climatology; meteorology; Global warming;; Statistical Downscaling;