Erika Coppola - ESS Open Archive

Erika Coppola

Reseracher

Erika Coppola received the Laurea degree in Physics (1998) from the University of L’Aquila and the PhD degree (2004) in Meteorology from the University of Reading, UK. She is currently a research scientist in the ICTP, ESP section, a position she has held since September 2006. She is actively involved in regional climate modeling, where she leads the development of high-resolution models (convection-permitting) and coordinates hydrological model research activities, specifically focusing on the development of the CHyM hydrological model. Her work includes the coupling of the hydrological model with the regional climate model (RegCM) for land-use impact studies and assessing the impact of climate change on future water resources. Additionally, she participates in projects investigating the use of machine learning techniques as climate emulators for climate projections, climate risk assessment, and climate impact studies. As a lead author, she contributed to the IPCC AR6 WGI, coordinating the assessment of regional climate information across all continents and contributing to the development of an updated IPCC risk assessment framework. Her current research focuses on assessing the impact of climate change on hazards at the regional scale through the use of regional climate models and hydroclimate models. Her interests include land-atmosphere interactions, monsoon climate, regional hydrological cycles, climate extremes, climate variability and change, and flood risk.

ICTP, Trieste

Public Documents 1

The Fifth Generation Regional Climate Modeling System, RegCM5: the first CP European...

Erika Coppola

and 12 more

January 16, 2024

The Regional Climate Modeling system (RegCM) has undergone a significant evolution over the years, leading for example to the widely used versions RegCM4 and RegCM4-NH. In response to the demand for higher resolution, a new version of the system has been developed, RegCM5, incorporating the non-hydrostatic dynamical core of the MOLOCH weather prediction model. In this paper we assess the RegCM5’s performance for 5 CORDEX-CORE domains, including a pan-European domain at convection-permitting resolution. We find temperature biases generally in the range of -2 to 2 degrees Celsius, higher in the northernmost regions of North America and Asia during winter, linked to cloud water overestimation. Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau show cold biases, possibly due to sparse station coverage. The model exhibits a prevailing cold bias in maximum temperature and warm bias in minimum temperature, associated with a systematic overestimation of lower-level cloud fraction, especially in winter. Taylor diagrams indicate a high spatial temperature pattern correlation with ERA5 and CRU data, except in South America and the Caribbean region. The precipitation evaluation shows an overestimation in South America, East Asia, and Africa. RegCM5 improves the daily precipitation distribution compared to RegCM4, particularly at high intensities. The analysis of wind fields confirms the model’s ability to simulate monsoon circulations. The assessment of tropical cyclone tracks highlights a strong sensitivity to the tracking algorithms, thus necessitating a careful model interpretation. Over the European region, the convection permitting simulations especially improve the diurnal cycle of precipitation and the hourly precipitation intensities.