Projected Changes in Multi-day Extreme Precipitation Over the Western Balkan Region

Abstract

Based on climate change projections, specifically scenarios without ambitious mitigation, climate change can be expected to continue in the Western Balkan region in the future. Even if the international Paris agreement achieves its goals and the mean global temperature increase remains well below 2 °C, we will face at least one more degree of warming and corresponding changes in other climate variables. Climate change projections show that for the Western Balkan region possible changes in the mean annual temperature, in relation to the period 1971–2000, range from 2 to 5.5 °C, depending on the scenario selected and the part of the region analyzed. Projections results shows that mean annual rainfall decrease can be up to −40%, compared to the reference period 1917–2000, and that most of the territory has negative anomaly. On the other side, many studies identify possible increases in the intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation in warmer climates. In addition, it is interesting that there will be a future change in multi-day episodes with extreme precipitation accumulations. In this paper, changes in the number of episodes with five-day accumulated precipitation over 60 mm and the overall accumulated precipitation during these episodes are analyzed for the Western Balkan region, using dynamically downscaled climate projections with a non-hydrostatic climate model that has an 8 km horizontal resolution.