Abstract
The use of a compact set of climate change indexes enhances our understanding of the combined impacts of extreme climatic conditions. In this study, we developed the modified Climate Extremes Index (mCEI) to obtain unified information about different types of extremes. For this purpose, we calculated 10 different climate change indexes considering the temperature extremes, extreme precipitation, and moisture surplus and drought over the Europe–Mediterranean (EURO–MED) region for the 1979–2016 period. As a holistic approach, mCEI provides spatiotemporal information, and the high-resolution grid-based data allow us to accomplish detailed country-based and city-based analyses. The analyses indicate that warm temperature extremes rise significantly over the EURO–MED region at a rate of 1.9% decade−1, whereas the cold temperature extremes decrease. Extreme drought has a significant increasing trend of 3.8% decade−1. Although there are regional differences, extreme precipitation indexes have a significant increasing tendency. According to the mCEI, the major hotspots for the combined extremes are the Mediterranean coasts, the Balkan countries, Eastern Europe, Iceland, western Russia, western Turkey, and western Iraq. The decadal changes of mCEI for these regions are in the range of 3–5% decade−1. The city-scale analysis based on urbanized locations reveals that Fes (Morocco), Izmir (Turkey), Marseille and Aix-en-Provence (France), and Tel Aviv (Israel) have the highest increasing trend of mCEI, which is greater than 3.5% decade−1.
Highlights
The warming rate of the climate system is at a remarkable level with respect to the1950s’ global temperature (IPCC Report, [1])
It is a metric that measures the proportion of an area experiencing extreme climatic conditions by averaging five indicators for monthly maximum and minimum temperature extremes, drought or moisture surplus based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) [19], extreme precipitation rate from 1 day precipitation extremes, and the number of wet–dry days
This method has been used over different regions, including the U.S [18,20,21,22,23,24], Australia [21,22,23,25], Asia [22,23], and Europe [21,22,23] with several modifications applied to the original Climate Extremes Index (CEI) formula
Summary
The warming rate of the climate system is at a remarkable level with respect to the. 1950s’ global temperature (IPCC Report, [1]). It is a metric that measures the proportion of an area experiencing extreme climatic conditions by averaging five indicators for monthly maximum and minimum temperature extremes, drought or moisture surplus based on the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) [19], extreme precipitation rate from 1 day precipitation extremes, and the number of wet–dry days This method has been used over different regions, including the U.S [18,20,21,22,23,24], Australia [21,22,23,25], Asia [22,23], and Europe [21,22,23] with several modifications applied to the original CEI formula. The Eastern Mediterranean region, and the north coast of Africa (hereafter referred to as the EURO–MED region)
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