Assessing the future evolution of climate extremes favouring floods using the regional climate model MAR over the CORDEX.be domain

In Belgium, most flooding events occur in winter as a result of intense precipitation events but also to the abrupt melting of the snow that covers the Ardennes summits. These conditions favourable to floods exhibit a decreasing trend over the period 1959–2010 resulting from the reduction in snow accumulation thought extreme precipitation events show a positive but non-significant signal.
In this study, we investigate how these trends could evolve in a warmer climate by using future projections performed with the regional climate model MAR (for “Modèle Atmosphérique Régional”) in the framework of CORDEX.be, the Belgian EURO-CORDEX project. These future projections were obtained by nesting MAR into NorESM1-M and MIROC5 under the RCP8.5 scenario. Both these global models were selected from the CMIP5 archive after evaluation of their ability to represent the current (1976-2005) mean climate over Europe. This assessment is based on the skill score methodology.
Results show that the period 2071-2100 would be marked by a decrease in snowfall amount, in snow accumulation, and consequently in conditions favourable to floods generated by snowpack melting with respect to 1976-2005. Regarding total PPN amount and extremes, the signal is less clear as both GCMs simulate different patterns and trends.