Attribution of Extreme Rainfall Events in the South of France Using EURO‐CORDEX Simulations

This study investigates how climate change affects the daily extreme precipitation events that occur in the autumn in Cévennes mountain range (South of France). We use an ensemble of 10 EURO‐CORDEX model simulations with two horizontal resolutions (0.11° and 0.44°). Those data sets, after pooling all models together, are fitted by stationary generalized extreme value and empirical distributions for several periods to estimate a climate change signal in the tail of distribution of extreme rainfall. We find that the exceedance probability of a 1‐in‐100‐year event in the historical climate has increased by a factor of 2.5 ± 0.8 under the current climate. The results show that higher‐resolution simulations with bias adjustment provide a robust and confident increase in the intensity and likelihood of occurrence of the events in the current climate in comparison with the historical climate. These changes are in agreement with an observations‐based analysis in a previous study.