Abstract
Summer extreme flooding in Central Europe is often associated with
Vb-cyclones which travel through the Mediterranean, then northwards east
of the Alps towards Central Europe. Extreme convective precipitation
intensities scale with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation under global
warming. This study quantifies the importance of convective
precipitation during Vb-events in present and in warmer climate by
simulating selected Vb-events with convection-permitting grid-spacing. A
simple convective precipitation diagnostic is compared against
Lagrangian convective cell tracking. The simple method shows skill
identifying convective precipitation in coarser simulations with
parameterized convection. On average, 30\% of
precipitation is classified as convective in reanalysis and historical
EC-Earth3 driven simulations. This fraction increases to
52\% in a warmer climate under SSP5-8.5 scenario. The
increase is explained by a frequency increase of the convectively active
cut-off low-pressure systems and a doubling of the convective fraction
in the less active trough-like Vb-cyclones, suggesting amplified flood
risk in a warmer climate.