How many RCM ensemble members provide confidence in the impact of land-use land cover change?

What is it about?

The paper addresses the question how many RCM simulations are needed to demonstrate the impact of land use land cover changes (LULCC) on regional climate, i.e. precipitation, temperature and other variables. Often, only one single simulation with and without LULCC is performed, and the resulting difference is interpreted as LULCC-induced "signal". We show that this is not appropriate, especially for precipitation, due to the high RCM internal variability ("noise") of this variable. We demonstrate this by means of ensemble simulations with perturbed initial conditions as well as appropriate statistical tests.

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