Impact of Land-Use Change and User-Tailored Climate Change Information from a High-Resolution Climate Simulation Ensemble

The KIT KLIWA ensemble of very high resolution climate simulations has been completed at HLRS in 2021 and is now available as a quasi-transient data set from 1971–2100 providing climate information down to the kilometer scale. A scale in which deep convection can be explicitly resolved by the model and is no longer parameterized. Within the report we analyse the benefit of those high-resolution simulations focusing on application issues and user-ready indices for climate adaptation. We found that climate change information could be resolved on the local scale, which showed dependencies of the projections on major landscapes as well as on land use. Furthermore, we analyse the impact of land use changes in climate models. Sensitivity studies using observed past land use changes show improved representation of the annual and summer temperature in large parts of Europe compared to a simulation with constant land cover. A second experiment with targeted land use changes towards an afforestation with deciduous trees shows that this could reduce peak heat wave temperatures compared to the prevalent coniferous forests.