# From Climate Conditions to the Numerical Slope Stability Analysis of Surface Coal Mines
## 4 Climate Projections--Future Events  
Climate change's impact on various systems and activities tends to increase incrementally with each day. Thus, it is necessary to anticipate its effects, especially concerning temperature and rainfall events affecting mining operations and reclamation, infrastructure maintenance, and management. Climate change directly influences temperature and precipitation in an increasing or decreasing manner, depending on the study area. Various  
Figure 4: Measurements for the last ten years of (**a**) maximum mean monthly and (**b**) maximum daily precipitation. aspects of climate change are analyzed in the literature due to its importance and broad implications, e.g., [40]. Specifically for the mining sector and the infrastructure, climate parameters should be projected in the future to prevent failures and catastrophic events. In this way, extreme future events can be considered for planning operations and designs. In this section, future rainfall and temperature are estimated for the Ptolemais area, with specific emission scenarios being the key ingredient of the analysis. The focus is on the climatic parameters' trends to evaluate if the past conditions will remain valid in the future. The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is the framework utilized in this work for climate projections; it provides tools that monitor, simulate, and project global climate conditions with high accuracy, being a rigorous framework built through international science coordination and partnerships. WCPR established the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) to produce regional climate projections for all continents [41]. The Earth System Grid Federation, a global consortium of data providers and data archives with a shared infrastructure, is used to access the CORDEX data [42]. Climate evolution can be simulated by global climate models and regional climate downscaling techniques. A global climate model can produce reliable projections on how average conditions will change in an area larger than 1000 km by 1000 km over the coming decades [43]. It is based on fundamental laws of matter and energy and uses mathematical equations to describe the earth's elements (e.g., atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and ice). Nevertheless, global climate models are inadequate in regions with complex orography [44]. During the last decades, regional climate downscaling techniques have provided higher resolution climate information [45] by combining regional climate models, global climate models, and empirical statistical downscaling. Regional models typically have 10-50 km resolution and detail all the local climate characteristics. A global climate model is always needed to provide the boundary conditions at the regional model's edges. This work uses eight regional climate models (named datasets) to assess the Ptolemais mine area's future climate conditions. These datasets originate from different assumptions regarding fundamental laws and constants. Thus, assessing all eight provides a solid basis for evaluating future climatic trends. The quantity of future greenhouse gas emissions is the critical element in predicting climate conditions and a source of great uncertainty. For this reason, four scenarios known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) were developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations and are systematically used in the literature. The RCPs describe different climate futures, all considered possible depending on the volume of greenhouse gases emitted in the years to come. The present work considers two emission scenarios: RCP 4.5, the median range or stabilization scenario, and RCP 8.5, the high-end, dystopian scenario. The output variables are presented as monthly averages, and of interest are the trends. The mean monthly temperature projections (not presented herein) present an increase of about 1-2 \({}^{\circ}\)C for RCP 4.5 and up to 4 \({}^{\circ}\)C for RCP 8.5.