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 southeastern Europe in 2012, generated a considerable amount of economic loss and resulted in the d...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2018-01-01
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| Series: | Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences |
| Online Access: | https://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/18/91/2018/nhess-18-91-2018.pdf |
| Summary: | 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 southeastern 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 to be responsive to an unfolding
extreme event.
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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 highlight 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 presented
and discussed with respect to previous studies. The results highlight the
accuracy of the developed index and the statistical robustness of the
distribution used to calculate the return periods. |
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| ISSN: | 1561-8633 1684-9981 |