Abstract
The risk of European extreme precipitation and flooding as an economic and humanitarian disaster is modulated by large-scale atmospheric processes that operate over (multi-)decadal periods and transport huge quantities of moisture inland from the oceans. Yet the previous studies for better understanding of extreme precipitation variability and its skillful seasonal prediction are far from comprehensive. Here we show that the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and, to a lesser extent, winter ENSO signal have a controlling influence not only concurrently on European extreme precipitation anomaly in winter, but in a delayed way on the extremes in the following seasons. In a similar pattern, there is a strong footprint of summer atmospheric circulations over the Mediterranean Sea on summer extreme precipitation and with 1-, 2- and 3-season lags on the following autumn, winter and spring extremes. The combined influences of the different atmospheric circulation patterns mark a significant step forward for an improved predictability of European extreme precipitation in the state-of-the-art seasonal prediction systems.
Highlights
Extreme weather events such as extreme precipitation and flooding have become more frequent and intense over time[1,2,3,4,5,6]
The improvement of the state-of-the-art seasonal prediction systems especially for the summer season is a matter of ongoing scientific debate
We estimate the extent to which decadal variations in extreme precipitation of different seasons can be explained by large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns including North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Arctic Oscillation (AO), Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and Western Mediterranean Oscillation (WeMO) through bivariate and multivariate correlation analyses
Summary
A strong AO imprint is not seen in the other seasons, and the regions with a significant correlation are more scattered It appears that atmospheric circulations over the Mediterranean Sea (WeMO) have no influence on European extreme precipitation in winter, spring and autumn (Fig. 2). The influenced areas by wintertime SOI range from 20% (10%) for spring precipitation to 25% (12%) for autumn precipitation for the 0.10 (0.05) significance level (Fig. 3e,f) These results offer potential predictability of European extreme precipitation on a seasonal scale and in general mark a significant step forward, given the large climate variability and a limited amplitude of the atmospheric response over the Atlantic-European sector[44,45]. Such improved predictability skill could be potentially useful to develop seasonal risk outlooks for mitigation policy definition, adaptation planning, disaster preparedness and budgetary planning to reduce the risk of fund depletion due to unexpected payouts for flood disasters
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