Climate change projections over the Mediterranean region have been elaborated by using the outputs of ten ENSEMBLES regional climate simulations with an horizontal resolution of 25 km under the SRES A1B emission scenario. The analysis concerns some surface atmospheric variables: mean sea level pressure, temperature, precipitation and wind speed. At first, model validations have been performed by comparing model results with E-OBS and ERA-Interim data in reproducing the last decades over some Italian sub-areas and the Alpine region.

In spite of the considerable spread in the models’ performances to represent the reference climate, a multi-model reconstruction has been computed and some seasonal climate change projections have been elaborated.

About the mean climate changes, the most significant signals expected by 2050 are a maximum warming (about 2 °C) and maximum drying (about 20%) in the southern Europe in summer. Moreover, the results indicate an increasing risk for some severe weather conditions: more days of extremely high temperature in summer over the whole area, a greater occurrence of flooding and storms over coasts during spring and autumn seasons and a more serious wet-snow event over Alpine region in winter. No significant signals of wind changes have been detected.