Assessing Climate Change Impacts on Precipitation and Temperature in a Mediterranean Basin under CMIP6 Scenarios

Abstract

This study explores projected climate change within a Mediterranean basin, with a particular focus on Ermenek Creek in southern Türkiye. The assessment utilizes precipitation, maximum temperature, and minimum temperature simulations from 24 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) belonging to the latest, sixth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to develop multi-model ensemble (MME) projections under both the CMIP6 historical experiment and two shared socio-economic pathway (SSP) scenarios: the mid-range SSP2-4.5 and the high-end SSP5-8.5. The MMEs are constructed using the best-performing CMIP6 GCMs at the Alanya and Hadim meteorological stations (MSs), which serve as representative synoptic points for the Ermenek watershed. To adequately represent model projection uncertainty, ensemble means are computed for each climate variable using bias-corrected simulations of one to eight models, with the optimal ensemble size determined through a multi-criteria basin-wide performance assessment relative to observed data. Findings reveal that incorporating more than three GCMs yields only peripheral improvements in simulation performance across evaluation metrics. Consequently, climate projections are derived using MMEs composed of the top three performing models and are analyzed over three 25-year periods between the years 2025 and 2099, relative to the historical baseline of 1968-2014. By reaching the end of the century, annual average maximum/minimum temperatures are expected to rise by up to 3.04 °C/2.74 °C at the Alanya MS and 3.34 °C/2.94 °C at the Hadim MS under SSP2-4.5, and by up to 5.21 °C/4.52 °C and 5.98 °C/4.84 °C, respectively, under SSP5-8.5. Concurrently, annual mean daily precipitation is expected to decline by as much as 10.6% and 8.9% at the Alanya and Hadim MSs, respectively, under SSP2-4.5, and by 24.9% and 23.4% under SSP5-8.5.

Keywords

• Climate change
• CMIP6
• Multi-model ensemble
• Precipitation
• Temperature
• Mediterranean hot spot

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