Heatwave classification over Europe and the Mediterranean region
By Marc Stéfanon, Fabio D'Andrea, Philippe Drobinski. 2012
323 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A method for defining and classifying heatwave events in the Euro-Mediterranean region is presented. The definition is based on the 95th centile of the local temperature probability density function, with additional criteria for spatial and temporal extension. The heatwave events are then classified into six classes by cluster analysis. The six heatwave patterns of Europe are described and compared to the existing literature. The most catastrophic extreme heatwaves (e.g. 2003 in Europe, 2010 in Russia) are shown to belong to one of these classes. It is then shown that the different classes are associated with different physical mechanisms. The effect of synoptic circulation and hydrological conditions are notably investigated. In particular, a drought appears to be a pre-requisite to heatwave occurrence in some clusters but not all.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/15e7f91bb57862a8b0906d748ffc304891685abb
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Citations in the corpus
- Drivers of exceptionally cold North Atlantic Ocean temperatures and their link to the 2015 European heat wave (2016, background): “Several regional drivers have been put forward including soil moisture, precipitation deficits and anomalously warm surface temperatures in marginal seas particularly the Mediterranean (Vautard et al 2005, Fischer et al 2007, Feudale and Shukla 2011a, Stefanon et al 2012).”
- Influence of blocking on Northern European and Western Russian heatwaves in large climate model ensembles (2018, methodology): “pressure system (Rex 1950, Tibaldi and Molteni 1990). The physical processes involved in blocking are currently still under discussion (e.g. Pfahl et al 2015). There is a well-known relationship between blocking and temperature extremes, which has been studied widely for winter (Buehler et al 2011, ”