Abstract
Abstract. 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. 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.
Highlights
Extreme-temperature anomalies have strong impacts on human health and activities
We notice that the correlation of the quantiles of Tmin and Tmax from ERAI, EOBS and LisFlood datasets are quite in agreement
Over certain countries, Tmin is measured during night time between 18:00 and 06:00 local time (LT) the following day, elsewhere from 00:00 to 24:00 LT or from 06:00 LT on day d to 06:00 LT on day www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/18/91/2018/
Summary
Extreme-temperature anomalies have strong impacts on human health and activities. The heat waves that occurred over western Europe in August 2003 caused about 70 000 deaths across 12 countries (Robine et al, 2008). In February 2012 a cold wave over central and eastern Europe generated more than EUR 700 million of damage, and 825 deaths were reported (de’Donato et al, 2013) Monitoring and cataloguing these events are crucial in order to place an event in its historical perspective and in order to assess the potential impacts on human health and activities by combining the information with data from other catalogues (such as EM-DAT, http://www.emdat.be, which includes information on the impacts). A catalogue would be appropriate to analyse the spatial and temporal evolution of the hazard related to temperature anomalies, and, in the future, to calibrate and validate an operational forecasting system in terms of these extreme events This product will be implemented in the operational monitoring system of the European Drought Observatory (EDO, http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu)
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