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Recent Climate Change at the Upper Danube—A temporal and spatial analysis of temperature and precipitation time series

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Abstract

The following study investigates temperature and precipitation trends in instrumental time series between 1960 and 2006 at 88 meteorological stations located in the Upper Danube Basin. Time series were tested for inhomogeneities with several common homogeneity tests, trend magnitudes of annual and seasonal time series were calculated by least square fitting and the significance of trend values was checked and quantified by the Mann-Kendall test. The results confirm a particularly strong recent Climate Change in the investigation area. Increasing temperature trends show remarkably high trend values up to 0.8°C/decade in the summer season. The trends are highly significant for all investigated summer, spring and annual time series. Winter and spring temperature trends show consistently positive trend values as well even though some time series show no significance at all and the calculated trend values are smaller. Autumn temperature trends are mostly non-significant with low values (up to 0.3°C/decade) and several negative trends. Most of the highest trend values can be found in lower altitudes whereas stations situated in alpine regions tend to show low trend magnitudes and often exhibit non-significant results. Precipitation time series show positive as well as negative trends in the annual and seasonal analysis. At most stations a precipitation decrease in summer and autumn and an increase in winter was observed during the last 47 years whereas the spring and mean annual precipitation exhibits no change at all. But most time series are not conclusive since they show predominantly no significance and they often exhibit only low trend values.

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Acknowledgements

GLOWA-Danube is financed by the German Ministry for Education and Research (bmb + f), the Free State of Bavaria and the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) of Munich. We thank the German Weather Service (DWD) and the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) for providing the necessary meteorological data. Special thanks go to Markus Muerth at the Department of Geography of LMU for his constant engagement in the improvement of this paper.

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  1. Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Luisenstr. 37, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Andrea Reiter, Ruth Weidinger & Wolfram Mauser

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  1. Andrea Reiter
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  2. Ruth Weidinger
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  3. Wolfram Mauser
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Correspondence to Andrea Reiter.

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Reiter, A., Weidinger, R. & Mauser, W. Recent Climate Change at the Upper Danube—A temporal and spatial analysis of temperature and precipitation time series. Climatic Change 111, 665–696 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0173-y

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