ABSTRACT: Climate scenarios are important tools for the description of climate developments. A proposal for the construction of climate scenarios is presented in this paper. The idea consists of the calculation of possible climate developments on the basis of coupling the safest hypothesis on the development of the future climate (for instance from climate model results) for a selected region with observed data from this region. Therefore, a statistical algorithm was developed by maintaining the stability of the main statistical characteristics (variability, kind of frequency distribution, annual cycle, persistence). Using a special cluster analysis algorithm, complex scenarios could be calculated which guarantee temporal, spatial and physical consistency of the considered meteorological parameters. The quality of the method was demonstrated by calculation over an example data series. In addition, the practicability of the algorithm was demonstrated for a selected region of Germany by using different scenario examples.

KEY WORDS: Climate change · Climate scenarios · Cluster analysis

Published in CR Vol. 8, No. 3 (1997) on October 9
ISSN: 0936-577X. Copyright © Inter-Research, Oldendorf/Luhe, 1997