Future extremes of temperature and precipitation in Europe derived from a combination of dynamical and statistical approaches

Abstract

[eng] Most of the nature-related economic costs and human losses in many regions of Europe are due to extreme weather events such as heat waves, cold spells, persistent droughts, heavy precipitation and intense cyclonic wind-storms. Extreme precipitation events are projected by climatic models to become more intense over the continent while droughts might last longer by the end of the century. In dry regions as Southern Europe, soils are predicted to dry out as temperatures and evapotranspiration rise and rainbearing atmospheric circulations become less frequent. Prospects on the future of climate indices linked to extreme phenomena are herein derived by using observed and model projected daily meteorological data. Specifically, E-OBS high resolution gridded datasets of observed precipitation and surface minimum and maximum temperatures have been used as the regional observed baseline. For projections, the same meteorological variables have been obtained from a set of regional climate models integrated in the European EURO-CORDEX project, considering the RCP8.5 future emissions scenario. A quantile–quantile adjustment has been applied to the simulated regional scenarios to reduce biases in modelled extreme regimes. Results suggest that warm days will substantially increase across Europe, consistently with a decrease of cold nights. An increase in heat wave amplitude is expected across the continent, with South Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean as the most affected regions. In contrast, Northern Europe will undergo the largest decrease in cold spell magnitude. An overall rise in the frequency and volume of heavy precipitations is projected in all seasons, even if the number of dry days is also expected to increase, except in the Baltic countries. Regarding abnormally long dry periods (extreme droughts), we find that the occurrence of episodes would reduce over Europe as consequence of projected increases in length.