The Hot Summer of 2010: Redrawing the Temperature Record Map of Europe
Abstract
The summer of 2010 was exceptionally warm in eastern Europe and large parts of Russia. We provide evidence that the anomalous 2010 warmth that caused adverse impacts exceeded the amplitude and spatial extent of the previous hottest summer of 2003. “Mega-heatwaves” such as the 2003 and 2010 events likely broke the 500-year-long seasonal temperature records over approximately 50% of Europe. According to regional multi-model experiments, the probability of a summer experiencing mega-heatwaves will increase by a factor of 5 to 10 within the next 40 years. However, the magnitude of the 2010 event was so extreme that despite this increase, the likelihood of an analog over the same region remains fairly low until the second half of the 21st century.
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References and Notes
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Published In
Science
Volume 332 | Issue 6026
8 April 2011
8 April 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Submission history
Received: 3 December 2010
Accepted: 2 March 2011
Published in print: 8 April 2011
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgements. This study was supported by the EU/FP6 project CIRCE (#036961) (D.B., J.L., R.T., and R.G.), the Instituto Dom Luiz–Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa project ENAC (PTDC/AAC-CLI/103567/2008) (D.B., R.T.), the Swiss National Science Foundation (Swiss National Center of Competence in Research–Climate) (E.F.), the EU/FP7 project ACQWA (#212250) (J.L.), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project PRIME (LU1608/1-1, AOBJ: 568460)within the Priority Program ‘INTERDYNAMIK’ (J.L.), the project “Historical climatology of the Middle East based on Arabic sources back to ad 800” (LU 1608/2-1 AOBJ 575150) (J.L.)and the project “Climate Change and Extreme Weather in Hesse--Analysis of observation data and ensemble projections for the 21st century” funded by the Hessian Centre on Climate Change and Geology (J.L.). The ENSEMBLES data used in this work was funded by the European Union/FP6 project ENSEMBLES (#505539), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. 20th Century and National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) reanalyses data were provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR)/Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Physical Sciences Division, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/.
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