final_program_abstracts[1]

11 IMSC Session Program
Change in temperature extremes over Europe
Friday - Poster Session 7
Concepcion Rodriguez-Puebla, Ana Casanueva and Nube Gonzalez-Reviriego
Department of Atmospheric Physics, University of Salamanca, Spain
The purpose of this study is to present results about the variability of temperature
extremes based on threshold exceedance: warm days (tx90), warm nights (tn90), cold
days (tx10), cold nights (tn10), cold wave duration index (cwdi) and heat wave
duration index (hwdi) for different seasons December-January-February (DJF),
March-April- June (MAM), June-July-August (JJA) and September-October-
November (SON) over Europe. One important motivation to perform this study is the
greater vulnerability of ecosystems to climate extremes than to mean climate changes.
We use the daily gridded datasets derived through interpolation of station data (E-
OBS) version 2.0 (Hofstra et al. 2009). The variability of the indices would be
analysed by means of probability density function (PDF), Singular Spectral Analysis
(SSA) and different procedures to derive the significance of the trend. The changes in
the extreme temperature indices would be explained by obtaining correlation analysis
and composite maps of large-scale variables for the most extreme values of the
indices by taking into account the atmospheric teleconnection indices and Sea Surface
Temperature (SST). We will discuss results for the four seasons and provide
additional details with respect to a previous study where temperature extremes of
annual time series were analyzed over the Iberian Peninsula (Rodriguez-Puebla et al.
2010). One application of this study is to propose statistical models to characterize the
extreme temperature indices and to learn how slow climate changes would affect the
variability of temperature extremes.
Hofstra, N; Haylock, M; New, M; Jones, PD (2009) Testing E-OBS European
highresolution gridded data set of daily precipitation and surface temperature. Journal
of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, 114, D21101, 21101-21101
Rodriguez-Puebla C., Encinas A.H., Garcia-Casado L.A. and Nieto S. (2010) Trends
in warm days and cold nights over the Iberian Peninsula: Relationships to large-scale
variables. Climatic Change. DOI 10.1007/s10584-009-9721-0
Abstracts 324