ESCENA (http://proyectoescena.uclm.es) was part of the Spanish Strategic action on energy and climate change. Funded by the Spanish government, this call aimed at providing the scientific basis for the assessment of regional climate change impacts over Spain (including continental Spain, the Balearic and Canary islands). The ESCENA project (2008-2011) agglutinated the regional climate modelling efforts. Four different institutions contributed simulations using 4 different Regional Climate Models (RCMs): Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM, PROMES model), Universidad de Murcia (UMUR, MM5 model), Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (UAHE, REMO model) and Universidad de Cantabria (UCAN, WRF model). The boundary forcing came from the Global Climate Model (GCM) simulations generated by the third Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) for the 4th IPCC Assessment Report (AR4). We used three different GCMs (ECHAM5-MPIOM, CNRM-CM3 and HadCM3) forced by the A1B, A2, and B1 emissions scenarios. An interesting feature of the experimental setup in ESCENA was the GCM/RCM matrix, which was designed to enable the comparison of different RCMs projections with a single specific change (RCM, scenario, GCM, parameterization). This allows the exploration of the role of different sources of uncertainty. The RCM simulations cover a common minimum domain encompassing the whole Spanish territory with a horizontal resolution of 25 Km. The project focused on the near future, simulating a control period (1950-2000, 1950 left as spin-up and disregarded in the analyses) forced by the 20C3M historical scenario and continued by a 50-year period, 2001-2050, of future projection. In this work we present the main results of the project, focusing on the future climate projection scenarios for impact-relevant variables.
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