Summer extremes are particularly devastating when they persist for several days: many consecutive hot-and-dry days causing harvest failure, or stagnating wet extremes causing flooding.
Despite this importance, persistence of extreme summer weather has largely been neglected by the climate science community.
- What maintains stagnating summer weather?
- Do climate models capture the underlying processes accurately?
- What is the role of global warming?
Persistence is linked to sea-surface temperature, soil moisture and atmospheric circulation which are expected to change with future warming but the uncertainties are large.
This study was conducted in collaboration with KNMI.
Contact information: Dim Coumou, Fei Luo and Sem Vijverberg.
For more information, please visit the site https://github.com/semvijverberg/RGCPD
Publications
- Raymond, C. et al. (2019). Projections and Hazards of Future Extreme Heat. In Pfeffer, W.T., Smith, J.B. & Ebi, K.L. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Planning for Climate Change Hazards (pp. 1–43). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190455811.013.59.
- Kornhuber, K. et al. (2019). Amplified Rossby waves enhance risk of concurrent heatwaves in major breadbasket regions. Nature Climate Change.
- Pfleiderer, P. et al. (2019). Summer weather becomes more persistent in a 2°C world. Nature Climate Change, 9, 666–671. doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0555-0