In a previous study, Lind & Kjellström (2009) showed that simulated precipitation in RCA3 forced by ERA40 on the lateral boundaries agrees well with the high-resolution bias-corrected, gridded data set for precipitation by Rubel & Hantel (2001) during 1996–2000 (see also Kjellström & Lind 2009). Also, the annual mean net precipitation (precipitation minus evaporation) over land agrees well with the observed

discharge for this region. Our results for the sea area support these earlier findings because RCA3-ERA40 results and SMHI data are in relatively good correspondence with monthly mean differences of less than about 20% (Figure 5). We found relatively large biases of the simulated mean seasonal cycles and their interannual variability when Ipilimumab order RCA3 is driven by the GCMs listed in Table 1. RCA3-BCM in particular AZD6244 price considerably underestimates inter alia the amplitude of the seasonal 2 m air temperature cycle. The maximum occurs in September and is more than 9°C smaller than the July maximum in RCA3-ERA40. Also, the other RCA3 simulations driven by GCMs underestimate both 2 m air temperature in summer and 10 m wind speed in summer and autumn (except CCSM3 for wind speed). All GCM driven simulations overestimate winter cloudiness. The summer biases are even larger

and have positive or negative signs depending on the driving GCM. Most models overestimate precipitation over the sea although this problem seems to have improved considerably compared to earlier studies (Räisänen et al. 2004). For instance, the annual mean precipitation and the mean seasonal cycle of precipitation are much better simulated in RCA3-ECHAM5 than in RCA3-ECHAM4 (Figure 5, Table 7). Although observed horizontal gradients of annual mean surface fields between sub-basins are reproduced Clomifene by most models (not shown), we also found discrepancies. For instance, in ECHAM4 and ECHAM5 driven simulations the mean SLP and the SLP gradient between the northern and southern Baltic Sea are well simulated, indicating a realistic large-scale circulation in these models; in contrast, in all HadCM3 driven simulations,

regardless of the HadCM3 version used (HadCM3_ref, HadCM3_low, HadCM3_high), the gradient is significantly underestimated, with SLP too low in the southern Baltic (for HadCM3_ref, see Figure 6; HadCM3_low and HadCM3_high are not shown). The largest SLP biases are found in the BCM driven simulation. Although SLP biases are the smallest in ECHAM5 driven RCA3 simulations, winds over the Baltic Sea have an artificial meridional component (Figure 6). The impacts of either horizontal resolution (25 or 50 km) or of the chosen RCM (RCA3 or RCAO) on SLP results is small compared to the impact of the lateral boundary data from various GCMs. In RCA3-ECHAM5 and RCA3-HadCM3_ref summer 2 m air temperatures are much too low (Figure 7).