Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Changes in the climate system
Map 3.9
Observed trends in maximum annual five-day consecutive precipitation across Europe in
winter and summer between 1960 and 2015
-30° -20°
Winter
-10°
0°
10°
20°
30°
40°
50°
60°
70°
-30° -20°
Summer
-10°
0°
10°
20°
30°
40°
50°
60°
70°
60°
60°
50°
50°
50°
50°
40°
40°
40°
40°
Trends in maximum of five–day consecutive precipitation for winter (left) and summer (right)
Note:
0°
Rx5d
(mm/decade)
10°
< – 5
20°
30°
– 5 to – 4
– 4 to – 3
– 3 to – 2
– 2 to – 1
– 1 to 0
0 to 1
1 to 2
40°
2 to 3
3 to 4
4 to 5
> 5
0°
10°
No data
Outside
coverage
20°
30°
0 500 1 000 1 500 km
This map shows observed trends in maximum annual five-day consecutive precipitation across Europe in winter (left) and summer (right)
between 1960 and 2015. Boxes with an outline contain at least three stations. Black dots show trends that are statistically significant
(at the 5 % level).
Source: EEA and UK Met Office, based on HadEX2 (updated from Donat, Alexander, Yang, Durre, Vose, Dunn et al., 2013).
40°
decreases are projected for some regions in southern
and south‐western Europe (Map 3.10, right) (Jacob et al.,
2014). Similar patterns were found for other heavy
precipitation indices (Rajczak et al., 2013; Sillmann et al.,
2013; Giorgi, Coppola and Raffaele, 2014).
The continued increase in the spatial and temporal
resolution of global and regional climate models
has generally improved the representation of
extreme precipitation and increased confidence in
model‐based projections (Kopparla et al., 2013; Giorgi,
Coppola, Raffaele et al., 2014; Montesarchio et al.,
2014). However, regional climate models with spatial
resolutions of between 10 and 30 km typically used in
climate change studies are still too coarse to explicitly
represent sub-daily localised heavy precipitation
events (Chan et al., 2014; Ban et al., 2015). Evidence
from high‐resolution climate models suggests that the
intensity of sub-daily extreme rainfall is likely to increase
in the future, whereby an increase of (theoretically
estimated) ~ 7 % per °C appears most likely in many
regions (Westra et al., 2014). A very high‐resolution
model (typically 1–5 km) used for weather forecasts with
explicit convection has recently been used for a climate
change experiment for a region in the United Kingdom.
This study projects intensification of short-duration
heavy rain in the summer, with significantly more events
exceeding the high thresholds indicative of serious flash
flooding (Kendon et al., 2014; Ban et al., 2015; Lehmann
et al., 2015).
Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report
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