Abstract
During the 2022 summer season, parts of Western Europe experienced record-breaking high temperature and drought conditions that had negative societal impacts. To enhance the predictability of regional temperature variability in Western Europe, we regionalized summer temperature and defined the distinct large-scale features of the anomaly fields driving cold and warm regimes at the temperature coherent regions over the land. Our results showed that while temperature anomalies in Western Europe exhibit spatial variability, cold and warm regimes are spatially coherent across landmass where the regional climates respond coherently to large-scale atmospheric circulations. Generally, warm regimes were triggered by horizontal pressure gradients associated with warm advection, by southerly winds. The dominance of cyclonic circulation over the North Sea and anticyclonic circulation over the Mediterranean results in enhanced warm air advection by southwest winds into most of the land in Western Europe. Meridional pressure gradient over the North Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the dominance of southerly winds over the North Atlantic corresponds with positive temperature anomaly over Portugal and western Spain. The dominance of anticyclonic ridge from the North Sea to the Baltic Sea corresponds with above-average temperatures over the United Kingdom and Western France. Moreover, different teleconnection patterns such as the Indian Ocean dipole, Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation and the Western Pacific Index are distinctively related to the summer temperature variability patterns. During the 2022 summer extreme temperature event, our results indicated above average increase in the amplitude of the circulations associated with warm regimes over the Western European landmass.
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Data availability
The CRU data is available at https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/. The NCEP-NCAR reanalysis and CPC precipitation data sets are available at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.html.
Code availability
R studio was used for coding the methods as described in the methodology section.
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Appendix
Appendix
Circulation types in Western Europe classified with the rotated T-mode PCA. The CTs are the SLP composites of the days the CTs occurred
Temperature anomaly composites of the CTs in Fig. 6 during the summer season. Anomaly is calculated with respect to the 1981–2010 climatology
Same as Fig. 7 but for the thickness anomaly composites. Thickness is calculated as the difference between the 850 hPa and 1000 hPa height
Summer temperature coherent regions as obtained from the ACCESS-CM2 GCM from 1850 to 2014
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Ibebuchi, C.C., Abu, IO. Characterization of temperature regimes in Western Europe, as regards the summer 2022 Western European heat wave. Clim Dyn 61, 3707–3720 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06760-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06760-4