Trend in precipitation and drought extremes in southern lowland regions of Europe

The effects of climate change on precipitation patterns can be observed on global scale, however, global climate change affects different regions more or less severely. Because of the high variability of precipitation in particular, future changes related to precipitation can be very different, even opposite on continental/regional scale. Even within Europe, the detected trends in precipitation patterns and extremes differ across the continent. According to climate model simulations for the future, Northern Europe is projected to become wetter, while the southern parts of the continent will tend to become drier by the end of the 21st century. The frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation will also increase in the whole continent. The possible shifts in precipitation patterns from wetter to drier conditions with fewer but increased extreme precipitation events can cause severe natural hazards, such as extended drought periods, water scarcity, floods and flash floods, therefore appropriate risk management is essential. For this purpose the analysis of possible hazards associated to specific precipitation-related weather phenomena is necessary and serves as key input.

Since plain regions play an important role in agricultural economy and are more exposed to floods because of their geographic features and the gravitational movement of surface water, our primary goal was to examine temporal and spatial changes in extreme precipitation events and dry spells in three European lowlands, located in the southern part of the continent. We selected the following regions: the Po-Valley located in Italy with humid subtropical climate; the Romanian Plain in Romania, and the Pannonian Plain covering different parts of Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania and Ukraine with humid continental climatic conditions.

Precipitation time series were used from the E-OBS v.22 dataset on a 0.1° regular grid. The dataset is based on station measurements from Europe and are available from 1950 onward with daily temporal resolution. For the analysis of main precipitation patterns, dry spells and extreme events, we use 17 climate indices (most of them are defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices, ECCDI). The analysis focuses on annual and seasonal changes in the three regions. The selected indices are capable to represent the differences and similarities between and within the plains. Our preliminary results show that the occurrence and intensity of extreme precipitation events increased in all regions, while the trends of duration and frequency of dry spells show both intra- and inter regional variability across the plains.