Winter storms with high loss potential in a changing climate: a regional perspective

摘要

In the RESTER (Strategien zur Reduzierung des Sturmschadenrisikos fur Walder) project the impacts of extreme storm events on the forests in Germany are analysed. The regional storm climate is quantified by means of wind gusts from regional climate models (REMO and CLM). Extreme value statistics are applied to estimate the gust wind speeds of a specific return period at every grid point. There is a systematic underestimation of the gust wind speeds in comparison to the observations (1971 –2000), but the spatial patterns due to the orographic influences are well reproduced by the regional models. They are able to resolve partially the orographic amplifications on wind speeds, what is the big advantage over the coarse resolution of the global models. In the future (2021 – 2050) changes of the storm climate in Southern and Central Germany are not well-defined, while in Northern Germany an increase of the storm activity seems to be likely. Apart from the analysis of single model runs an ensemble composite of different models and scenarios is created to quantify the probability of the changes.