To investigate the climate of the Carpathian Region (17°-27°E; 44°-50°N), the European Commission launched in
2010 and financed the CARPATCLIM project. The CARPATCLIM consortium was made by nine country members
(Austria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ukraine) under the scientific
and technical coordination of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). The CARPATCLIM members
collected, quality-checked, homogenized, harmonized, and interpolated daily data for sixteen meteorological
variables and more than thirty derived indicators related to the period 1961-2010. The principal outcome of the
project is the Climate Atlas of the Carpathian Region, hosted on a dedicated website (www.carpatclim-eu.org) and
made of high-resolution daily grids (0.1°x0.1°) of all variables and indicators. In order to describe the climate evolution
of the Carpathian Region, we analyzed the spatial and temporal variability of ten variables: minimum, mean,
and maximum temperature, daily temperature range, precipitation, cloud cover, relative sunshine duration, relative
humidity, surface air pressure, and wind speed. For each variable, we performed a linear trend analysis on an annual
and seasonal basis. Temperature was found to increase in every season, in particular in the last three decades,
confirming the trends occurring in Europe; wind speed decreased in every season; cloud cover and relative humidity
decreased in spring, summer, and winter, and increased in autumn, whilst relative sunshine duration behaved in
the opposite way; precipitation and surface air pressure showed no significant trend, though they increased slightly
on an annual basis. In the Carpathian region positive/negative sunshine duration anomalies are highly correlated to
the corresponding temperature anomalies during the global dimming (1960s-1970s) and brightening (1990s-2000s)
periods.
SPINONI Jonathan;
VOGT Juergen;
SZALAI Sandor;
SZENTIMREY Tamas;
LAKATOS Monica;
BIHARI Zita;
MIHIC Dragan;
CHEVAL Sorin;
2015-01-26
European Meteorological Society
JRC91756
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC91756,
