The long-term dataset of High Resolution Atmospheric Forcing Fields (HiResAFF) for Northern Europe since 1850

Project: ECOSUPPORT - ECOSUPPORT (Advanced tool for scenarios of the Baltic ECOsystem to SUPPORT decision making) was funded by the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS. The project addresses the urgent need for policy-relevant information on the combined historical to future impacts of climate change and industrial and agricultural practices in the Baltic Sea catchment on the Baltic Sea ecosystem. The main aim was to provide a multi-model system tool to support decision makers. The tool is based upon scenarios from an existing state-of-the-art coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean-land surface model for the Baltic Sea catchment area, marine physical-biogeochemical models of differing complexity, a food web model, statistical fish population models, economic calculations, and new data detailing climate effects on marine biota. Various multi-model and statistical datasets have been developed spanning the period 1850 to 2100. For details, see http://www.baltex-research.eu/ecosupport/ . Summary: High RESolution Atmospheric Forcing Fields (HiResAFF) consist of key meteorological variables on daily scale which are typically used to drive ocean or ecosystem models. The fields are reconstructed through non-linear statistical upscaling using the analog-method (Schenk and Zorita, 2012). The method resamples atmospheric fields from a regional climate model (RCAO/RCA3) in time based on the best pattern similarity in the predictor space of homogenous historical station data since 1850. The dataset provides physically consistent homogeneous atmospheric fields suitable to derive long-term simulations and statistical analysis since 1850 over the North Sea and Baltic Sea region of Europe. The analog-method and reconstruction skill is described in Schenk and Zorita (2012) and the extended dataset to 1850 in Schenk (2015). The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 217246 made with the joint Baltic Sea research and development programme BONUS, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (03F0492A).