Some indicators of the present and future climate of Serbia according to the SRES-A1B scenario

Abstract

According to the last IPCC report, there are several indications that the area of Southeastern Europe might experience large climate changes due to the increase of the concentration of greenhouse gases. These include results of several regional climate studies. In order to objectively study the climate change, precipitation and temperature indices can be used. Climate indices can be calculated either from the local observations of temperature and precipitation or from climate simulations. In this study, we use the results of dynamical downscaling of global simulations obtained by the atmosphere–ocean global circulation model SINTEX-G (AOGCM SX-G/INGV) using a regional climate model, the EBU-POM. The EBU-POM is the combination of the Eta/NCEP as the atmospheric component and Princeton Ocean Model (POM) as the ocean component. Global simulations were done for the very long period 1771–2100, while downscaling was done for the 1961–1990 and 2071–2100 periods according to the SRES-A1B scenario. Climate indices of two groups are considered. The first group is related to temperature: frost days, growing season length, maximum number of consecutive frost days, and number of tropical days. The second group is related to precipitation: number of days with precipitation ≥10 mm/day, maximum number of consecutive dry days, and simple daily intensity index. The analyses of these climate indices are done for all seasons. Results are presented separately for northern (plains) and southern (mountainous) regions of Serbia. According to the SRES-A1B scenario, the results from the regional model show an overall increase in the surface air temperature of about 2°C and decrease in precipitation of about 6 mm (~10%) per year over Serbia. The results indicate that number of tropical days will increase, while total number of frost days and heavy rain days will decrease in the future. The results also indicate shorter duration of frost periods and longer duration of dry and vegetation periods over the Serbian region.