Abstract
Few studies explore extreme wintertime European cold waves (CW) despite their huge economic, and social impacts and a recent decade punctuated by CW (February 2012, January 2017 or March 2018), while Europe bets on mild winter to avoid an energy crisis in 2023. Here, we investigate potential early CW warning signals and model biases over the winters (November-to-March) of the 1950–2005 period, calculating the atmospheric and surface conditions of key climate variables (e.g. snow, incoming radiation, cloudiness, pressure, winds and sea surface temperatures variables) both in reanalyses and climate models, before and during CW events. We show that global coupled climate models systematically overestimate the number of CW in the present-day period. Until 30 days before CW, some robust and significant early patterns emerge, both in models and reanalyses: weak atmospheric blocking, anomalously negative North Sea surface temperatures (SST) and a deficit of incoming longwave radiation. Downward shortwave radiation is anomalously positive during and before CW which weakens arguments for direct negative solar forcing on winter extreme cold events in Europe. Climate models share in their great majority (> 80%) these patterns (for dynamical and radiative-related variables, spatial correlation r > 0.7) and can correctly simulate the sign of climate variables anomalies during and at least 7 days before CW. We find that excess of European snow cover and snow depth are unlikely to cause occurrences of CW, but the advection of cold air masses (North-East) emerges as a potential precursor signal of a majority of CW. In a context of climate change, fossil fuels scarcity and increased uncertainty due to geopolitical events, it is crucial to study the sensitivity of the energy, health and agriculture sectors to compound extreme weather, including cold waves.
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Data availability
The datasets generated are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Change history
22 June 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03560-x
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Acknowledgements
This work has received support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101003469 (XAIDA) and the grant ANR-20-CE01-0008-01 (SAMPRACE). We acknowledge the E-Obs dataset from the EU project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://eca.knmi.nl). We thank the ECMWF for providing ERA-Interim (http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim_full_daily/). We also acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP5 (http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5), and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 1 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. We would thank Sébastien Denvil (IPSL) who, in the frame of PRODIGUER project, gave access to CMIP5 outputs on CICLAD server. Finally, we thank Stéphane Goyette from the University of Geneva for reviewing an early version of this manuscript and for his valuable comments.
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Quesada, B., Vautard, R. & Yiou, P. Cold waves still matter: characteristics and associated climatic signals in Europe . Climatic Change 176, 70 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03533-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03533-0