Spatial clustering of summer temperature maxima from the CNRM-CM5 climate model ensembles & E-OBS over Europe

Reducing the dimensionality of the complex spatio-temporal variables associated with climate modeling, especially ensembles of climate models, is a challenging and important objective. For studies of detection and attribution, it is especially important to maintain information related to the extreme values of the atmospheric processes. Typical methods for data reduction involve summarizing climate model output information through means and variances, which does not preserve any information about the extremes. In order to help solve this challenge, a dependence summary measure appropriate for extreme values must be inferred. Here, we adapt one such measure from a recent study to a larger domain with a different variable and gridded data from observations and climate model ensembles, i.e. E-OBS observations and the CNRM-CM5 model. The handling of such ensembles of data is proposed, as well as a comparison of the spatial clusterings between two different ensembles, here a present-day and a future ensemble of climate simulations. This method yields valid information concerning extremes, while greatly reducing the data set. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.