Top ten European heatwaves since 1950 and their occurrence in the coming decades

By Simone Russo, J. Sillmann, Erich Fischer. 2015

681 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Russian heatwave in 2010 killed tens of thousands of people, and was by far the worst event in Europe since at least 1950, according to recent studies and a novel universal heatwave index capturing both the duration and magnitude of heatwaves. Here, by taking an improved version of this index, namely the heat wave magnitude index daily, we rank the top ten European heatwaves that occurred in the period 1950–2014, and show the spatial distribution of the magnitude of the most recent heatwave in summer 2015. We demonstrate that all these events had a strong impact reported in historical newspapers. We further reveal that the 1972 heatwave in Finland had a comparable spatial extent and magnitude as the European heatwave of 2003, considered the second strongest heatwave of the observational era. In the next two decades (2021–2040), regional climate projections suggest that Europe experiences an enhanced probability for heatwaves comparable to or greater than the magnitude, extent and duration of the Russian heatwave in 2010. We demonstrate that the probability of experiencing a major European heatwave in the coming decades is higher in RCP8.5 than RCP4.5 even though global mean temperature projections do not differ substantially. This calls for a proactive vulnerability assessment in Europe in support of formulating heatwave adaptation strategies to reduce the adverse impacts of heatwaves.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee6a98d6fc0792b80abcf285eb0a381f4c6fc7e5

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Citations in the corpus

When will unusual heat waves become normal in a warming Africa? (2016, methodology): “As demonstrated by many studies (Barriopedro et al 2011, Russo et al 2014, Christidis et al 2015, Russo et al 2015, Zampieri et al 2016) the 2010 Russian heat wave was a very unusual event in Europe and across the entire globe.”
Synoptic and meteorological drivers of extreme ozone concentrations over Europe (2016, background): “Climate change is expected to influence regional weather conditions, such as warmer temperatures or stagnant conditions, and an increase in heatwaves (Russo et al 2015), which will likely adversely affect ozone levels and, consequently, air quality in Europe.”
Drivers of exceptionally cold North Atlantic Ocean temperatures and their link to the 2015 European heat wave (2016, methodology): “In the summer of 2015 following the development of the cold ocean anomaly, Europe experienced a major heat wave that has been ranked in the top ten over the past 65 years (Russo et al 2015).”
European summer temperatures since Roman times (2016, neutral): “Europe has experienced a pronounced summer ( June – August ) warming of approximately 1.3 ° C over the 1986 – 2015 period ( ﬁ gure 1b ) , accompanied by an increase of severe heat waves ( length, frequency and persistency ) , most notably in 2003, 2010 and 2015 ( Luterbacher et al 2004, Schär et al ”
Wheat yield loss attributable to heat waves, drought and water excess at the global, national and subnational scales (2017, methodology): “The heat analysis is inspired by the HWMId (Russo et al 2015, Zampieri et al 2016).”
Extreme heat waves under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming (2018, methodology): “…and heat waves at both global and regional scale (e.g. Meehl and Tebaldi 2004, Cowan et al 2014, Russo et al 2014, Pal and Eltahir 2016, Russo et al 2015, Lehner et al 2016, Dosio 2017, Mora et al 2017, Im et al 2017, King et al 2017, Perkins-Kirkpatrick et al 2017) and some assessed…”
Influence of blocking on Northern European and Western Russian heatwaves in large climate model ensembles (2018, methodology): “Russo et al (2015) showed that this index captures the top ten European heatwaves in the recent past, as reported in newspapers.”
Forest microclimates and climate change: Importance, drivers and future research agenda (2021, positive): “The current and future increase in daily maximum temperatures during the warm season will in many areas lead to more intense, more frequent and persistent heat waves (Meehl & Tebaldi, 2004; Russo et al. 2015).”
Heat wave exposure in India in current, 1.5 °C, and 2.0 °C worlds (2017, methodology): “We estimate characteristics of heatwaves using the method of Russo et al (2015).”
Severity of drought and heatwave crop losses tripled over the last five decades in Europe (2021, background): “Climate change is expected to further increase the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, and duration of EWDs (IPCC 2012, Russo et al 2015, Diffenbaugh et al 2017).”