Attribution of seasonally-relevant climate indicators in Hungary

Although anthropogenic global warming is well-described in the climate community, some socioeconomic groups are still skeptical about it due to various reasons, and they do not know how to associate local weather or climate events with global warming. It is our duty to raise awareness by conveying easily understandable yet scientifically sound and straightforward information and to explain how human activity contributes to climate impacts in front of our eyes, in our region. Although it is widely assessed now in Western Europe, in Hungary from September 2021 we began our comprehensive analyses and raised awareness in several social strata through our local attribution project.

Within the project, we selected seasonally relevant and publicly well-known climate indicators (e.g., vegetation start in spring, heatwaves and forest aridity in summer, second summer in autumn, snow in winter), since they either have a fairly large public interest or have big impacts in our region. Dissemination is done mainly via a well-known online Hungarian platform with broad media coverage, while their social media network is also used with short messages. Results are published in each season at around an event occurrence or absence (e.g., when there is no snow in winter, when vegetation starts too early in spring).

For the analysis, we used several state-of-the-art data sets consisting of global climate model simulations with both natural-only and historical forcings, an ensemble of regional climate model simulations with strong mitigation and non-mitigation future scenarios, and high-quality, gridded observations.