Human influence on European winter wind storms such as those of January 2018

Abstract

Abstract. Several major storms pounded Western Europe in January 2018, generating large damages and casualties. The two most impactful ones, Eleanor and Friederike, are analyzed here in the context of climate change. Near surface wind speed station observations exhibit a decreasing trend of the frequency of strong winds associated with such storms. High-resolution regional climate models on the other hand show no trend up to now and a small increase in the future due to climate change. This shows that that factors other than climate change, which are not represented (well) in the climate models, caused the observed decline in storminess over land. A large part is probably due to increases in surface roughness, as shown for a small set of stations covering The Netherlands and in previous studies. This trend could therefore be independent from climate evolution. We concluded that human-induced climate change has had so far no significant influence on storms like the two studied. However, all simulations indicate that global warming could lead to a marginal increase (0–20 %) of the probability of extreme hourly winds until the middle of the century, consistent with previous modelling studies. However, this excludes other factors, such as roughness, aerosols, and decadal variability, which have up to now caused a much larger negative trend. Until these factors are simulated well by climate models they cannot give credible projections of future storminess over land in Europe.

Extreme windstorms and sting jets in convection-permitting climate simulations over Europe

“…This is mostly accounted for by Shapiro-Keyser cyclones as well as those in which sting jets are detected. Although the 10-year simulations assessed here are relatively short, the response of the future climate simulation is similar to previous studies (Leckebusch et al 2007;Pinto et al 2007Pinto et al , 2012Gastineau and Soden 2009;Donat et al 2011;Zappa et al 2013;Vautard et al 2019), and an increase of extreme windstorms seems a robust response to anthropogenic climate change across many studies (Feser et al 2015). However, assessments of multi-model ensembles reveal a large spread in the simulated response from different models indicating a significant role of internal variability (Donat et al 2011;Zappa et al 2013).…”

Extreme windstorms and sting-jets in convection-permitting climate simulations over Europe

“…This is mostly accounted for by Shapiro-Keyser cyclones as well as those in which sting-jets are detected. Although the 10-year simulations assessed here are relatively short, the response of the future climate simulation is similar to previous studies (Leckebusch et al, 2007;Pinto et al, 2007;Gastineau and Soden, 2009;Donat et al, 2011;Zappa et al, 2013;Pinto et al, 2012;Vautard et al, 2019), and an increase of extreme windstorms seems a robust response to anthropogenic climate change across many studies (Feser et al, 2015). However, assessments of multi-model ensembles reveal a large spread in the simulated response from different models indicating a signi cant role of internal variability (Donat et al, 2011;Zappa et al, 2013).…”

Statistical Methods for Extreme Event Attribution in Climate Science

“…Other definitions relate to, for example, the number of days above specific absolute temperature or precipitation thresholds, or more complex definitions relate to the length or persistence of climate extremes. Recent studies have also focused on surface wind (Vautard et al, 2019), extent of sea ice cover (Kirchmeier-Young et al, 2017) and fires (Kirchmeier-Young et al, 2019). For temperatures averaged in time and space, tracking changes in means and variances of Gaussian variables can be enough, but some important climate variables are not normally distributed.…”