AIR TEMPERATURE AND PRECIPITATION CHANGES IN EUROPE IN THE 21 ST CENTURY ACCORDING TO CANADIAN CLIMATE MODEL M. Melo 1 and S. Valachovičová 2 1 Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia, melo@fmph.uniba.sk 2 Faculty of Natural Sciences, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia Abstract Climate change owing to increasing greenhouse effect means serious problem at present. The most important sources of information about behaviour of climate system under changed conditions are climate models. In this paper Canadian climate models outputs (CCCM 2000) are utilized for preparation of climate change scenarios (air temperature, precipitation amount) for Europe in the 21 st century. The results are based on outputs from “A2-SRES” forcing scenario, which represent a pessimistic variant. We can say that the increasing of air temperature is growing from ocean`s part (1.2 °C) to continental`s part (7.0 °C). Also optimistic “B2-SRES” forcing scenario for illustration and comparison with “A2-SRES” is used. Results demonstrated a more modest warming in the 21 st century in Europe in case of the “B2-SRES” scenario. Key words: climate change, climate scenarios, climate model, air temperature, precipitations amount Introduction Combustion of fossil fuels, land-use changes, industry, agriculture, … cause growth of greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere. The result of this process is that the world is getting warmer. The global average surface temperature has increased by 0.6 ± 0.2°C since the late 19 th century. It is very likely that the 1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental record since 1861. It is likely that the rate and duration of the warming of the 20 th century is larger than any other time during the last 1,000 years. Even the 1990s are likely to have been the warmest decade of the millennium in the Northern Hemisphere, and 1998 is likely to have been the warmest year (IPCC 2001). According to Bartholy and Pongrácz (2006) global and European trends of the extreme temperature indices are consistent with the global warming. Regional temperature of Central/Eastern Europe became warmer during the second half of the 20 th century. The most advisable method for creating future climate scenarios is climate models outputs. At the present time the most highly developed climate models are atmospheric and oceanic general circulation models (GCMs). In many cases the GCMs of the atmosphere and oceans are developed as separate models. The coupled GCMs then arise by mutual combining. Climate change experiments based on different GCMs have been carried out by several groups (e.g. Boer et al. 1992, McFarlane et al. 1992, Murphy and Mitchell 1995, Russell and Rind 1999, Flato and Boer 2001, The GFDL Global Atmospheric Model Development Team 2004). In this paper model data from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis in Victoria, B.C. is utilized. This center has developed six global climate simulation models for climate prediction. A brief description of some these models and their results can be found e.g. in McFarlane et al. (1992), Boer et al. (1992). CCCM 1989 model, CCCM 1992 model and CCCM 2001 model are only global atmospheric GCMs. Next three models are the global coupled models (CCCM 1997 model, CCCM 2000 model, the third coupled CCCM model is at present in the final stage of development and testing; model outputs are not available at the present time). We utilize model data from the second version of the Canadian Global Coupled Model (CCCM 2000 or CGCM2). Oceanic part of the Canadian global coupled models is based on the GFDL MOM1.1 prepared in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University (New Yersey, USA). The second version of the Canadian Global Coupled Model (CCCM 2000) is based on the earlier CCCM 1997, but