Erika Coppola

Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics | ICTP · Section of Earth System Physics

High-quality climate information tailored to cities’ needs assists decision makers to prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts, as well as to support the targeted transition towards climate resilient cities. During the last decades, two main modelling approaches emerged to understand and analyse the urban climate and to generate information....

The Regional Climate Modeling system (RegCM) has undergone a significant evolution over the years, leading for example to the widely used versions RegCM4 and RegCM4-NH. In response to the demand for higher resolution, a new version of the system has been developed, RegCM5, incorporating the non-hydrostatic dynamical core of the MOLOCH weather predi...

The Pacific Walker circulation and the closely connected El Niño/Southern Oscillation influence the climate and weather of the tropical Indo-Pacific region. They specifically exert a strong control on the regional occurrence of weather extremes, such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation and prolonged dry spells, which are becoming increasingly frequen...

Climate change is a global challenge with multiple far-reaching consequences, including the intensification and increased frequency of many extreme-weather events. In response to this pressing issue, we present ClimaMeter, a platform designed to assess and contextualize extreme-weather events relative to climate change. The platform offers near-rea...

Climate change poses significant threats to global biodiversity, particularly impacting arthropods due to their sensitivity to shifts in temperature and precipitation, as well as other environmental conditions. These changes impact the suitability of their habitats, alter ecological interactions, and consequently affect the distribution and surviva...

The advancement of computational resources has allowed researchers to run convection-permitting regional climate model (CPRCM) simulations. A pioneering effort promoting a multimodel ensemble of such simulations is the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS) on “Convective Phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean” over an extended Alps region. In th...

Observations are increasingly used to constrain multi-model projections for future climate assessments. This study assesses the performance of five constraining methods, which have previously been applied to attempt to improve regional climate projections from CMIP5-era models. We employ an out-of-sample testing approach to assess the efficacy of t...

Extreme precipitation events lead to dramatic impacts on society and the situation will worsen under climate change. Decision-makers need reliable estimates of future changes as a basis for effective adaptation strategies, but projections at local scale from regional climate models (RCMs) are highly uncertain. Here we exploit the km-scale convectio...

The Regional Climate Modeling system (RegCM) has undergone a significant evolution over the years, leading for example to the widely used versions RegCM4 and RegCM4-NH. In response to the demand for higher resolution, a new version of the system has been developed, RegCM5, incorporating the non-hydrostatic dynamical core of the MOLOCH weather predi...

Conference presentation for PALEOSIM project

Convection-permitting (CP) simulations were evaluated during the wet season from October 2009 to March 2010, characterized by numerous extreme daily rainfall events in southeastern South America. We analyzed six simulations using WRY (versions 3.8.1 and 3.9.0) and RegCM4, considering parameterized convective processes (20 km resolution, non-CP) and...

Climate change is a global challenge with multiple far-reaching consequences, including the intensification and increased frequency of many extreme weather events. In response to this pressing issue, we present ClimaMeter, a platform designed to assess and contextualise extreme weather events relative to climate change. The platform offers near rea...

We use analogues of atmospheric patterns to investigate changes in four devastating Acqua Alta (flooding) events in the lagoon of Venice associated with intense Mediterranean cyclones occurred in 1966, 2008, 2018 and 2019. Our results provide evidence that changes in atmospheric circulation, although not necessarily only anthropogenically driven, a...

Plants emit biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) in response to changes in environmental conditions (e.g. temperature, radiation, soil moisture). In the large family of BVOCs, isoprene is by far the strongest emitted compound and plays an important role in ozone chemistry, thus affecting both air quality and climate. In turn, climate change...

Conference presentation for PALEOSIM project

The advancement of computational resources has allowed researchers to conduct convection-permitting regional climate model (CPRCM) simulations. A pioneering effort promoting a multimodel ensemble of such simulations is the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Studies (FPS) on "Convective Phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean" over an extended Alps region. I...

Conference Poster for PALEOSIM project

Statistical physics and dynamical systems theory are key tools to study high-impact geophysical events such as temperature extremes, cyclones, thunderstorms, geomagnetic storms and many more. Despite the intrinsic differences between these events, they all originate as temporary deviations from the typical trajectories of a geophysical system, resu...

Extreme precipitation events leads to dramatic impacts on society and the situation will worsen under climate change ¹ . Decision-makers need reliable estimates of future changes as a basis for effective adaptation strategies, but projections at local scale from regional climate models (RCMs) are highly uncertain ² . Here we exploit the first km-sc...

The present study analyses the climate change response of Alpine-Mediterranean heavy precipitation events (HPEs), often associated with hazardous flooding. We investigate HPE properties describing their propagation, scale and intensity, by applying a storm tracking algorithm in an ensemble of convection permitting regional climate models (cpRCMs) u...

Heatwaves (HWs) are high-impact phenomena stressing both societies and ecosystems. Their intensity and frequency are expected to increase in a warmer climate over many regions of the world. While these impacts can be wide-ranging, they are potentially influenced by local to regional features such as topography, land cover, and urbanization. Here, w...

We introduce the latest version of the RegCM regional climate modeling system, RegCM5. Compared to the previous model version (RegCM4) the main new development is the inclusion of the non‐hydrostatic dynamical core from the weather prediction model MOLOCH, which is more accurate and much more computationally stable and efficient than the previous o...

Plants emit biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) in response to changes in environmental conditions (e.g., temperature, radiation, soil moisture). In the large family of BVOCs, isoprene is by far the largest emitted compounds and plays an important role in ozone chemistry, thus affecting both climate and air quality. In turn, climate change...

The increase in computational resources has enabled the emergence of multi-model ensembles of convection-permitting regional climate model (CPRCM) simulations at very high horizontal resolutions. An example is the CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study on “Convective phenomena at high resolution over Europe and the Mediterranean”, a set of kilometre-scale sim...

Abstract The climate science and applications communities need a broad and demand‐driven concept to assess physical climate conditions that are relevant for impacts on human and natural systems. Here, we augment the description of the “climatic impact‐driver” (CID) approach adopted in the Working Group I (WGI) contribution to the Intergovernmental...

The CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study ELVIC (climate Extremes in the Lake VICtoria basin) was recently established to investigate how extreme weather events will evolve in this region of the world and to provide improved information for the climate impact community. Here we assess the added value of the convection-permitting scale simulations on the repr...

This study assesses future projections of flood hazards across the Italian river basins. For this purpose, sub-daily river discharge for the entire Italian territory was simulated with the CETEMPS hydrological model (CHyM) using as climate forcing both observational datasets and regional climate simulations completed with the ICTP Regional Climate...

The collaboration between the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) and the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) provides open access to an unprecedented ensemble of Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations, across the 14 CORDEX continental-scale domains, with global coverage. These simulations have been used as a new line of...

To comprehend the significance of the local topography of the nearby mountains in simulating summer monsoon precipitation over Bangladesh and its surrounding regions, we have analyzed Miroc5, MPI-ESM-MR, NorESM1-M GCM simulations from the CMIP5 experiments, four RegCM driven from the above three GCMs, and one reanalysis dataset. Our study demonstra...

Recent studies over different geographical regions of the world have proven that regional climate models at the convection-permitting scale (CPMs) improve the simulation of precipitation in many aspects, such as the diurnal cycle, precipitation frequency, intensity, and extremes at daily—but even more at hourly—time scales. Here, we present an eval...

Here, we analyze future projections of cyclone activity in the Mediterranean region at the end of the twenty-first century based on an ensemble of state-of-the-art fully-coupled Regional Climate System Models (RCSMs) from the Med-CORDEX initiative under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. Despite some noticeable biases, all the RCSM...

Heatwaves (HWs) are high-impact phenomena that stress both societies and ecosystems. Their intensity and frequency are expected to increase in a warmer climate over many regions of the world. While these impacts can be wide ranging, they are potentially influenced by local to regional features such as topography, land-cover, urbanization. Here, we...

This study evaluates for the first time the performance of the latest version of the non-hydrostatic RegCM4 (RegCM4-NH) customized over two vast urban agglomerations in China (i.e., the Pearl River Delta, PRD, and the Yangtze River Delta, YRD). A one-way double nesting configuration is used, with a mother domain (20 km grid spacing) driven by ERA-I...

This Summary, based on the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, is tailored to the actuarial community. It has been co-developed by the authors of the IPCC report and a team of actuaries and catastrophe experts from the IAA. The scientific data and conclusions are attributed alone to the IPCC, while the need for emphasis on some risks, and the comments ab...

The role of aerosol on the snow darkening effect is considered one of the main factors contributing to snow melting and glacier retreat over the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau (HTP). Using the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)’s regional climate model, RegCM4, we examine the changes induced by aerosol deposition over the HTP snow a...

The CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study ELVIC (climate Extremes in the Lake VICtoria basin) was recently established to investigate how extreme weather events will evolve in this region of the world and to provide improved information for the climate impact community. Here we assess the added value of the convection-permitting scale simulations on the repr...

We describe the development of a non-hydrostatic version of the regional climate model RegCM4, called RegCM4-NH, for use at convection-permitting resolutions. The non-hydrostatic dynamical core of the Mesoscale Model MM5 is introduced in the RegCM4, with some modifications to increase stability and applicability of the model to long-term climate si...

The identification of flood prone areas is essential for a range of engineering, risk reduction and research applications. Here, we describe a combined hydrological and hydraulic modelling approach for the assessment of flood‐prone areas and we present the results obtained over the Po river (Northern Italy). Runoff and river discharges are calculat...

Future projections in austral winter characteristics of explosive extratropical cyclones (EECs) in three CORDEX Southern Hemisphere domains (Africa-AFR, Australia-AUS and South America-SAM) are investigated. The projections are obtained with a fine resolution (25 km) Regional Climate Model (RegCM4) within the CORDEX-CORE framework driven by three G...

We describe the first effort within the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment - Coordinated Output for Regional Evaluation, or CORDEX-CORE EXP-I. It consists of a set of 21st century projections with two regional climate models (RCMs) downscaling three global climate model (GCM) simulations from the CMIP5 program, for two greenhouse g...

Changes in the characteristics of austral winter (June-July-August) synoptic activity in three domains (Africa, Australia and South America) of the extratropical Southern Hemisphere projected with the Regional Climate Model version 4 (RegCM4) are presented. The model is nested in three global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercompar...

We use an unprecedented ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) projections over seven regional CORDEX domains to provide, for the first time, an RCM-based global view of monsoon changes at various levels of increased greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. All regional simulations are conducted using RegCM4 at a 25 km horizontal grid spacing using lateral...

Renewable energy is key for the development of African countries, and knowing the best location for the implementation of solar and wind energy projects is important within this context. The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of climate change on solar and wind energy potential over Africa under low end (RCP2.6) and high end (RCP8.5) emi...

The information of when and where region-specific patterns in both mean and extreme temperatures leading to heat stress will emerge from the present-day climate variability is important to plan adaptation options, but to date studies on this issue still remain limited and fragmented. Here, we estimate the time of emergence (TOE) of temperature and...

The added value of using regional climate models (RCMs) to downscale data from general circulation models (GCMs) has often been questioned and researched. Although several studies have used different methods to identify (and in some cases quantify) the added value, there is still a need to find a general metric that quantifies the added value of an...

Hazardous weather related to the occurrence of severe thunderstorms including tornadoes, high-winds, and hail cause significant damage globally to life and property every year. Yet the impact on these storms from a warming climate remains a difficult task due to their transient nature. In this study we investigate the change in large-scale environm...

A new regional climate projection ensemble has been created for the Australasia region as part of the World Climate Research Programs Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). The CORDEX-Australasia ensemble is the largest regional climate projection ensemble ever created for the region. It is a 20-member ensemble made by 6 regional cli...

The new Coordinated Output for Regional Evaluations (CORDEX-CORE) ensemble provides high-resolution, consistent regional climate change projections for the major inhabited areas of the world. It serves as a solid scientific basis for further research related to vulnerability, impact, adaptation and climate services in addition to existing CORDEX si...

This study evaluates the projected changes in the atmospheric water budget and precipitation under the RCP8.5 scenario over two CORDEX-CORE domains: South America (SAM) and Europe (EUR). An ensemble of five twenty-first century projections with the Regional Climate Model version 4 (RegCM4) and their driving Global Climate Models (GCMs) are analyzed...

The interannual variability of the boreal winter (DJF) subtropical jet stream (STJ) is analyzed over the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment—Central America, Mexico, and Caribbean domain (CORDEX-CAM) during 1980–2010. We use simulations with the regional climate model RegCM4 (version 7) at 25 km resolution driven by ERA-Interim (RegERA) and...

The use of regional climate model (RCM)‐based projections for providing regional climate information in a research and climate service contexts is currently expanding very fast. This has been possible thanks to a considerable effort in developing comprehensive ensembles of RCM projections, especially for Europe, in the EURO‐CORDEX community (Jacob...

The CORDEX-CORE initiative was developed with the aim of producing homogeneous regional climate model (RCM) projections over domains world wide. In its first phase, two RCMs were run at 0.22° resolution downscaling 3 global climate models (GCMs) from the CMIP5 program for 9 CORDEX domains and two climate scenarios, the RCP2.6 and RCP8.5. The CORDEX...

The original version of the article contained error in the Fig. 8 caption was swapped and below is the corrected caption.

The characteristics of tropical cyclone (TC) activity over five TC basins lying within four Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) domains are examined for present and future climate conditions using a new ensemble of simulations completed as part of the CORDEX-CORE initiative with the regional climate model RegCM4. The simulations ar...

The Working Group I (WGI) contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assess the physical science basis of climate change. As part of that contribution, this Technical Summary (TS) is designed to bridge between the comprehensive assessment of the WGI Chapters and its Summary for Policymakers (SPM). I...

This chapter assesses climate information relevant to regional impact and risk assessment. It complements other WG1 chapters which focus on the physical processes determining changes in the climate system and on methods for estimating regional changes. This chapter is new in the IPCC WGI assessment reports, in that it represents a contribution to...

Global warming is likely to cause a progressive drought increase in some regions, but how population and natural resources will be affected is still underexplored. This study focuses on global population, forests, croplands and pastures exposure to meteorological drought hazard in the 21st century, expressed as frequency and severity of drought eve...