EGU22-4257
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-4257
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Trends in temperature and precipitation in high mountain areas in Spain from the Spanish Hig Mountain Climate Database

Javier Sigro1, Antonio Jesús Pérez-Luque2, Carmen Pérez-Martínez2, Teresa Vegas-Vilarrubia3, and Maria Jesus Esteban-Parra4
Javier Sigro et al.
  • 1Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Centre for Climate Change (C3), Tarragona, Spain (javier.sigro@urv.cat)
  • 2Department of Ecology and Institute of Water Research, University of Granada, Spain.
  • 3Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona, Spain
  • 4Dept. Applied Physics, University of Granada, Spain

Mountain regions are areas characterized by great spatial variability in climate variables, due to the great differences in altitude, orientation and the abrupt topography that characterizes them. These features of the territory, together with a relative lower density of meteorological stations, make it difficult to characterize climate change in these areas.

This work describes the Spanish High Mountain Climate Database (SHMCDv1) consisting of daily quality controlled and homogenised records of maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation for the territories that include the two highest altitude national parks in mainland Spain, the Sierra Nevada National Park (PNSN) and the Aigüestortes i Sant Maurici National Park (PNASM), and its area of ​​influence.

To build this database, 129 climatic series corresponding to the PPNASM area and 166 series in the PNSN area have been used, for the period between 1893 and 2020, obtained from various sources (AEMET, SMC, Climanevada database, LOOP Project). A systematic quality control has been applied to the series using the RClimdex-extraqc (see http://www.c3.urv.cat/data/manual/Manual_rclimdex_extraQC.r.pdf). This procedure has allowed the identification of 857 values considered erroneous, of which 10% has been recovered with the correct value. Its homogeneity has been tested and adjusted with a CLIMATOL homogenization method developed by J. Guijarro (2016) (see http://www.climatol.eu/index.html). 205 inhomogeneities have been detected and adjusted in the temperature series, which represents an average of 2 inhomogeneities for each series.

In total, thermo-pluviometric series have been composed for a set of 98 meteorological stations, 27 of them located above 1500 meters of altitude.

Sen’s estimator of the slope have been used to estimate the temperature and precipitation trends corresponding to low mountain areas (<1500 m altitude) and high mountains (> 1500 m altitude) are calculated and analyzed to determine if there are differences in the evolution of recent temperature or precipitation due to altitude and between both mountain areas.

This work has been done thanks to funding from MINECO and MITECO, through the projects LACEN-CLI (ref: 2476-S/2017), MEROMONT (ref: CGL2017-85682-R) and Smart EcoMountains (LifeWatch-2019-10-UGR-01).

How to cite: Sigro, J., Pérez-Luque, A. J., Pérez-Martínez, C., Vegas-Vilarrubia, T., and Esteban-Parra, M. J.: Trends in temperature and precipitation in high mountain areas in Spain from the Spanish Hig Mountain Climate Database, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-4257, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-4257, 2022.