EURO-SUPREME: sub-daily precipitation extremes in the EURO-CORDEX ensemble

Abstract. Extreme precipitation events can lead to devastating floods, loss of life and severe infrastructure damage and are expected to increase in a warming world, highlighting the urgent need to quantify current-day and future extremes. Although intense precipitation extremes are generally better represented by high-resolution climate models, large ensemble datasets are lacking. Yet, these are very essential for estimating uncertainties of future trends. Here, the EURO-SUPREME dataset, with DOI: doi.org/10.26050/WDCC/EURCORDEX_prec (Van de Vyver et al., 2024), is presented that includes extreme precipitation events from the EURO-CORDEX 0.11° ensemble (coupled to CMIP5) for accumulated precipitation depths ranging from 1 hour to 72 hours. More specifically, the data are provided by a 35-member ensemble of historical and future (RCP8.5) annual-maxima on the EURO-CORDEX domain, covering 4984 simulation years in total. The resource is designed to enable climate-model benchmarking and support various state-of-the-art scientific research efforts and climate-change risk assessments. We provide a validation of the EURO-SUPREME dataset for various countries in Europe and investigate the changes in intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation under different global warming levels. Furthermore, we disentangle the RCM and GCM contributions to the biases. Finally, we provide a practical application of using EURO-SUPREME as a benchmark for high-resolution convection-permitting models for Belgium.