P.M.M. Soares

University of Lisbon | UL · Instituto Geofísico do Infante D. Luiz

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...

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 impact of rising greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere on the temperature distributions is felt not only in the mean values but primarily in the extremes. The temperature distributions are becoming slightly flattened and more broadened towards higher values, leading to a decrease in extreme cold events and more importantly to a considerable...

Wave phenomena impact high commercial value coastal and offshore activities, infrastructures and transportation. The knowledge of future wave conditions allows for consistent long-term planning and decision-making. The present study aims to provide robust, reliable projections of the potential future wave conditions of the Black Sea under the influ...

Taking advantage of a large ensemble of Convection Permitting-Regional Climate Models on a pan-Alpine domain and of an object-oriented dedicated analysis, this study aims to investigate future changes in the high-impact fall Mediterranean Heavy Precipitation Events at high warming levels. We identify a robust multi-model agreement for an increased...

Deep learning (DL) methods have recently garnered attention from the climate change community, as an innovative approach for downscaling climate variables from Earth System and Global Climate Models (ESGCMs) with horizontal resolutions still too coarse to represent regional-to-local-scale phenomena. In the context of the Coupled Model Intercomparis...

As a result of warming and precipitation deficits, the increasing shortage of water resources, droughts have become one of the main drivers of desertification, land degradation and food insecurity with direct impacts on ecosystems and society, especially in fragile communities. Over the Iberian Peninsula, a known climate change hotspot, the occurre...

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...

The Fire Weather Index (FWI) is used to assess meteorological fire danger worldwide. It has been argued that it lacks an atmospheric instability term. A new enhanced FWI (FWIe) was recently developed incorporating atmospheric instability in the form of the Continuous Haines Index (CHI). Here, the first climatological and evolution analysis of these...

We present the first evaluation of the wind field from the ensemble of kilometer-scale simulations from the CORDEX-Flagship Pilot Study on convection, with focus on the Adriatic region. Kilometer-scale climate models, also known as convection-permitting models (CPMs), produce a good representation of small-scale topographic features and consequentl...

Climate projections are a powerful tool that can help decision makers to timely prepare adaptation policies, which may then be efficiently implemented. In this study, a comprehensive analysis of how climate change may affect Portugal (located in a climate change hotspot) is conducted, providing the foundations to the first National Roadmap for Adap...

Portugal is regularly affected by destructive wildfires that have severe social, economic, and ecological impacts. The total burnt area in 2017 (∼540,000 ha) marked the all-time record value since 1980 with a tragic toll of 114 fatalities that occurred in June and October events. The local insurance sector declared it was the costliest natural disa...

The case study is located in an agricultural area of alluvial origin, approximately 10 km northeast of Lisbon (Portugal). The area is a peninsula surrounded by River Tejo, its estuary, and by River Sorraia. The peninsula lies 1 to 2 m above sea level, with saline groundwater arising from the estuarine tides. The soil is typically clayey and homogen...

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...

The Iberian Peninsula is a known climate change hotspot. In the last decades, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) has allowed for thousands of Global Climate Model (GCM) simulations to be conducted, an important tool to assess and understand future changes in Earth's climate. The comparison of past future projections with observations...

Climate change constitutes a major threat for all the Mediterranean countries due to the combination of large precipitation reductions and temperature increases and the higher frequency of climate extremes, especially driving water scarcity and all the derived multi-sectoral impacts. Portugal, as most of the Mediterranean countries, already endures...

As a result of warming and precipitation deficits, the increasing shortage of water resources and droughts have become one of the main drivers of desertification, land degradation and food insecurity with direct impacts on ecosystems and society, especially in fragile communities. Over the Iberian Peninsula, a known climate change hotspot, the occu...

Wave phenomena impacts high commercial value coastal and offshore activities, infrastructures, and transportation. The knowledge of future wave conditions allows for consistent long-term planning and decision-making. The present study aims to provide robust, reliable projections of the potential future wave conditions of the Black Sea under the inf...

In the context of the CORDEX project, an ensemble of regional climate simulations (RCMs) of high resolution on a 0.11° grid has been generated for Europe with the objective of improving the representation of regional to local‐scale atmospheric phenomena. However, such simulations are computationally expensive and do not always reveal added value. H...

Cities concentrate people, wealth, emissions, and infrastructure, thus representing a challenge and an opportunity for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This urgently demands for accurate urban climate projections to help organizations and individuals to make climate-smart decisions. However, most of the large ensembles of global and region...

Seasonal snow cover plays a major role in the climate system of the Northern Hemisphere via its effect on land surface albedo and fluxes. In climate models the parameterization of interactions between snow and atmosphere remains a source of uncertainty and biases in the representation of local and global climate. Here, we evaluate the ability of an...

Rainfall is considered the most important physical process for landslide triggering in Portugal. It is expected that changes in the precipitation regimes in the region, as a direct consequence of climate change, will have influence in the occurrence of extreme rainfall events that will be more frequently, throughout the century. The aim of this stu...

In the context of the CORDEX project, an ensemble of regional climate simulations of high resolution on a 0.11º grid has been generated for Europe with the objective of improving the representation of regional to local-scale atmospheric phenomena. However, such simulations are computationally expensive and do not always reveal added value. In this...

We present the first evaluation of the wind field from the CORDEX-FPS ensemble of kilometer-scale simulations, with focus on the Adriatic region. Kilometer-scale climate models, also known as convection-permitting models (CPMs), produce a good representation of small-scale topographic features and consequently a more detailed depiction of dynamical...

This study evaluates the performance of a dynamic ensemble of wave climate simulations for the Black Sea. The ensemble members (and ensemble means) are evaluated for the historical period (1979‐2005). The spectral wave model SWAN was forced with eight Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) based Regional Climate Models (RCMs) wind fi...

Land cover in sub-polar and alpine regions of northern and eastern Europe have already begun changing due to natural and anthropogenic changes such as afforestation. This will impact the regional climate and hydrology upon which societies in these regions are highly reliant. This study aims to identify the impacts of afforestation/reforestation (he...

In the recent past, an increase in computation resources led to the development of regional climate models with increasing domains and resolutions, spanning larger temporal periods. A good example is the World Climate Research Program – Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the European domain (EURO-CORDEX). This set of regional m...

Over the years, higher-resolution regional climate model simulations have emerged owing to the large increase in computational resources. The 12 km resolution from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) is a reference, which includes a larger multi-model ensemble at a continental scale while sp...

Cities concentrate people, wealth, emissions, and infrastructures, thus representing a challenge and an opportunity for climate change mitigation and adaptation. This places an urgent demand for accurate urban climate projections to help organizations and individuals making climate smart-decisions. However, most of the state-of-the-art global and r...

In the context of the first phase of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment in the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) flagship plot study on Land Use and Climate Across Scales (LUCAS), we investigate the biophysical impact of afforestation on the seasonal cycle of soil temperature over the European continent with an ensemble of 10 regio...

The complexity of the state-of-the-art climate models requires high computational resources and imposes rather simplified parameterization of inland waters. The effect of lakes and reservoirs on the local and regional climate is commonly parameterized in regional or global climate modeling as a function of surface water temperature estimated by atm...

The recent ECMWF (European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) reanalysis product (ERA5) is a 3D-atmospheric dataset of unparalleled value to advance the characterization and understanding of the main global coastal low-level jet (CLLJ) systems, due to its finer resolution (horizontal and vertical) and hourly output. Regional climate studies...

Regional climate simulations with high horizontal resolutions are becoming increasingly common and although model development has continually enhanced the representation of climate, these improvements are variable, region and time scale dependant. The high computational costs of increasingly smaller grid‐spacing underline the need for a robust asse...

Land cover in sub-polar and alpine regions of northern and eastern Europe have already begun changing due to natural and anthropogenic changes such as afforestation. This will impact the regional climate and hydrology upon which societies in these regions are highly reliant. This study aims to identify the impacts of afforestation/reforestation (he...

28 In the Northern Hemisphere, the seasonal snow cover plays a major role in the climate system via its 29 effect on surface albedo and fluxes. The parameterization of snow-atmosphere interactions in climate 30 models remains a source of uncertainty and biases in the representation of the local and global climate. 31 Here, we evaluate the ability o...

Climate change effect analysis on the hydrologic cycle is essential for the assessment of water management strategies. Climate models can provide projections of precipitation changes in the future, based on greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. In this study the EURO-CORDEX (European COordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment) climate models were fi...

Over the years higher resolution Regional Climate Model simulations have emerged owing to the large increase in computational resources. The 12 Km resolution from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) is a reference, which includes a larger multi-model ensemble at a continental scale while spa...

In the recent past, the increase of computation resources led to the appearance of regional climate models with increasing domains and resolutions, spamming larger temporal periods. A good example is the World Climate Research Program – Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the European domain (EURO-CORDEX). This set of regional m...

The impact of climate change on wheat and barley yields in two regions of the Iberian Peninsula is here examined. Regression models are developed by using EURO-CORDEX regional climate model (RCM) simulations, forced by ERA-Interim, with monthly maximum and minimum air temperatures and monthly accumulated precipitation as predictors. Additionally, R...

The complexity of the state-of-the-art climate models requires high computational resources and imposes rather simplified parameterization of inland waters. The effect of lakes and reservoirs on the local and regional climate is commonly parameterized in regional or global climate modeling as a function of surface water temperature estimated by atm...

This paper presents the first multi-model ensemble of 10-year, “convection-permitting” kilometer-scale regional climate model (RCM) scenario simulations downscaled from selected CMIP5 GCM projections for historical and end of century time slices. The technique is to first downscale the CMIP5 GCM projections to an intermediate 12–15 km resolution gr...

In the context of the first phase of the Euro-CORDEX Flagship Plot Study (FPS) Land Use and Climate Across Scales (LUCAS), we investigate the afforestation impact on the seasonal cycle of soil temperature over the European continent with an ensemble of ten regional climate models (RCMs). For this purpose, each ensemble member performed two idealize...

Here we present the first multi-model ensemble of regional climate simulations at kilometer-scale horizontal grid spacing over a decade long period. A total of 23 simulations run with a horizontal grid spacing of $$\sim $$ ∼ 3 km, driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis, and performed by 22 European research groups are analysed. Six different regional cli...

One of the World Climate Research Programme Grand Challenges is to evaluate whether existing observations are enough to underpin the assessment of weather and climate extremes. In this study, we focus on extreme associated with atmospheric rivers (ARs). ARs are characterized by intense moisture transport usually from the tropics to the extra-tropic...

Marine Heatwave (MHW) events have been increasing all around the world, causing severe impacts on marine ecosystems and on the economy of the aquaculture, fishing and tourism industries. In this study, the occurrence and characteristics of MHW events in the North Atlantic are analyzed for a recent period (1971–2000) and the two future periods (2041...

In the last decades, offshore wind harvesting has increased enormously, and is seen as a renewable energy resource with great potential in many regions of the world. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how this resource will evolve in a warming climate. In the present study, offshore wind resource in the Southwestern African region is analysed f...

Droughts are a long-term weather-driven extreme event which occurs worldwide with great socio-economic impacts, namely in the Mediterranean and the Iberian regions. In a changing climate with rising temperatures, extreme events, such as droughts, are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, particularly in Mediterranean climates. In this co...

In recent years, research related to the occurrence of marine heatwave (MHW) events worldwide has been increasing, reporting severe impacts on marine ecosystems which led to losses of marine biodiversity or changes in world fisheries. Many of these studies, based on regional and global coupled models, show relevant biases in the MHW properties when...

Two separate heatwaves affected western Europe in June and July 2019, in particular France, Belgium, the Netherlands, western Germany and northeastern Spain. Here we compare the European 2019 summer temperatures to multi-proxy reconstructions of temperatures since 1500, and analyze the relative influence of synoptic conditions and soil-atmosphere f...

A global quantitative characterization of offshore wind power density is presented over the economic exclusive zones (EEZs), at annual and seasonal scales, based on the recently released ECMWF ERA-5 reanalysis. Compared to its predecessors, ERA-5 features increased spatial and temporal resolutions, along with improved model parameterizations and da...

Most state-of-the-art climate simulation ensembles misrepresent the effects of urbanization on local climate due to computational restrictions, posing a major limitation for urban climate projections. We circumvent this shortcoming by employing the SURFEX land-surface model coupled to TEB (Town Energy Balance) urban canopy model, forced by EURO-COR...

The biophysical effects of re/af-forestation on the diurnal temperature cycle in European summer are investigated by analyzing a Regional Climate Model (RCM) ensemble, established within the Land Use and Climate Across Scales Flagship Pilot Study (LUCAS FPS). With this RCM ensemble, two idealized experiments are performed for Europe, one with a con...

A recently launched project under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program’s (WCRP) Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiments Flagship Pilot Studies program (CORDEX-FPS) is presented. This initiative aims to build first-of-its-kind ensemble climate experiments of convection permitting models to investigate present and future convective...

The IPCC 1.5 °C report argues for a 50% cut of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Dangerous gaps lie between what is required to reach the 1.5 °C objective, what governments have pledged and what is happening in reality. Here, we develop ‘climate policy gap’ graphics for Portugal, Spain and Morocco to help reveal this divide and quantify the...

Upcoming climate change effects will vary with region, season and time of the day. Existing annual and daily temperature cycles will shift and be reshaped, leading to increased air temperatures earlier and later in the year. Buildings will be affected by these changes, especially the ones using passive design strategies, whose performance is highly...

In a recent study, Coppola et al (2020) assessed the ability of an ensemble of convection‐permitting models (CPM) to simulate deep convection using three case studies. The ensemble exhibited strong dis crepancies between models, which were attributed to various factors. In order to shed some light on the issue, we quantify in this paper the uncerta...

This work evaluates the daily precipitation and mean temperature of eight CORDEX‐EUR11 ERA‐Interim‐driven simulations of EURO‐CORDEX over the Iberian Peninsula (IP) for the period 1989–2008. To this aim, three observational data sets (Iberia01, E‐OBS‐v19e, and MESAN‐0.11) were considered as reference and compared with the models by means of several...

Despite the efforts of the modelling community to improve the representation of the sea surface temperature (SST) over the South Eastern Tropical Atlantic, warm biases still persist. In this work we use four different configurations of the fully-coupled AWI Climate Model (AWI-CM) which allow us to gain physics-based insight into the role of the oce...