Climate projection for the Mediterranean and related impacts on drought and wildfire risk

This contribution, which presents results of the work being currently in progress, is an update of our presentation in the previous ICFBR conference held in 2011 in Alghero. The updates consist in (i) using new GCM data (CMIP5 are used instead of the old CMIP3), (b) inclusion of the drought indices into the climate change projection (motivated by the fact that the wildfire risk is closely correlated with drought occurrence), (iii) updated stochastic weather generator used to simulate Fire Weather Index (FWI), and (iv) enhanced weather-friendly climate change scenarios, which include changes in climate characteristics not accounted for in our earlier experiments. The contribution will consist of two parts. In the first part, the CMIP5 data are used to create the multi-GCM climate change scenarios for the whole of Mediterranean in terms of temperature, precipitation and selected drought indices (including PDSI and SPEI). In the second part, the climate change impacts in terms of FWI characteristics and set of drought-related indicators will be determined for stations in four south European regions (Sardinia, Apulia, Croatia and Spain). The input weather series will be produced by the updated stochastic weather generator M&Rfi. To represent the future climate, the WG parameters will be modified by GCM-based climate change scenarios. We will focus on two aspects of the methodology: (a) Validity of WG, which will be examined by comparing the indicators obtained with the synthetic weather series vs observed weather series. Various settings of the WG will be considered to optimize its model. (b) Climate change scenarios will include changes in low frequency (monthly) and high-frequency (diurnal and interdiurnal) weather variability, which is mostly not taken into account in the climate change impact studies. We will assess an effect of these changes on results of our impact experiment.