Towards a monitoring system of temperature extremes in Europe

Extreme temperature anomalies such as heat and cold waves may have strong impacts on human activities and health. The heat waves in Western Europe in 2003 and in Russia in 2010, or the cold wave in South-Eastern Europe in 2012, generated a considerable amount of economic loss and resulted in the death of several thousands of people. Providing an operational system to monitor extreme temperature anomalies in Europe is thus of prime importance to help decision makers and emergency services which are responsive to an unfolding extreme event. In this study, the development and the validation of a monitoring system of extreme temperature anomalies are presented. The first part of the study describes the methodology based on the persistence of events exceeding a percentile threshold. The method is applied to three different observational datasets, in order to assess the robustness and highlighting uncertainties in the observations. The climatology of extreme events from the last 21 years is then analysed to highlight the spatial and temporal variability of the hazard and discrepancies amongst the observational datasets are discussed. In the last part of the study, the products derived from this study are compared to those of previous studies that used longer time series. The results highlight the accuracy of the developed index and the statistical robustness of the distribution used to calculate the return periods.

LAVAYSSE Christophe;  CAMMALLERI Carmelo;  DOSIO Alessandro;  VAN DER SCHRIER G.;  TORETI Andrea;  VOGT Juergen; 

2018-01-09

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH

JRC106842

1561-8633,   

https://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/18/91/2018/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC106842,   

10.5194/nhess-18-91-2018,