Present-day and future mediterranean precipitation extremes assessed by different statistical approaches

The Mediterranean area is strongly vulnerable to future changes in temperature and precipitation, particularly concerning extreme events, and has been identified as a climate change hot spot. This study performs a comprehensive investigation of present-day and future Mediterranean precipitation extremes based on station data, gridded observations and simulations of the regional climate model (REMO) driven by the coupled global general circulation model ECHAM5/MPI-OM. Extreme value estimates from different statistical methods—quantile-based indices, generalized pareto distribution (GPD) based return values and data from a weather generator—are compared and evaluated. Dynamical downscaling reveals improved small-scale topographic structures and more realistic higher rainfall totals and extremes over mountain ranges and in summer. REMO tends to overestimate gridded observational data in winter but is closer to local station information. The dynamical–statistical weather generator provides virtual station rainfall from gridded REMO data that overcomes typical discrepancies between area-averaged model rainfall and local station information, e.g. overestimated numbers of rainy days and underestimated extreme intensities. Concerning future rainfall amount, strong summer and winter drying over the northern and southern Mediterranean, respectively, is confronted with winter wetting over the northern part. In contrast, precipitation extremes tend to increase in even more Mediterranean areas, implying regions with decreasing totals but intensifying extremes, e.g. southern Europe and Turkey in winter and the Balkans in summer. The GPD based return values reveal slightly larger regions of increasing rainfall extremes than quantile-based indices, and the virtual stations from the weather generator show even stronger increases.