Spatiotemporal investigation of wet–cold compound events in Greece

Abstract

Abstract. Climate change is set to affect extreme climate and meteorological events. The combination of interacting physical processes (climate drivers) across various spatial and temporal scales resulting to an extreme event is referred to as compound event. The complex geography and topography of Greece forms a variety of regions with different local climate conditions affecting the daily minimum temperature and precipitation distributions and subsequently the distribution of compound events of low temperature and high precipitation values. The aim of our study in this work is to identify these wet–cold events based on observational data from the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (HNMS) stations, which are divided into five different geographical categories, in the period 1980–2004 and coldest months of the year (November-April) on monthly basis. Two available reanalysis products, that of ERA-Interim downscaled with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model at 5km horizontal resolution (WRF_5), and the coarser resolution (∼30 km) ERA5 Reanalysis dataset from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), are adopted to derive a gridded monthly spatial distribution of wet–cold compound events, after performing a comparison with the observations. The results yield that the monthly maximum HNMS probabilities range from 0.07 % in April to 0.85 % in February, ERA5 range from 0.4 % in April to 2.97 % in February and WRF_5 from 10.4 % in November to 25.04 % in February. The results also displayed that February, January and December, are in this order, the months with the highest WCCEs.