Year-round Mediterranean Weather Regimes for exploring the occurrence of extreme precipitations

Weather regimes (WRs) provide useful information about large scale variability over relatively large regions, and they can be linked to extreme events occurring at the land surface, such as heat waves and extreme precipitations. Studies in this direction have shown how e.g., Euro-Atlantic WRs modulate flow dependent variability in North America and Europe and their links to extreme precipitation events. To date, the relationship of weather regimes specific to the Mediterranean with extreme events have not been sufficiently explored. The Mediterranean region is a hotspot for climate change and for its peculiar position, at the frontier between very different systems, it is influenced by a complex mix of large-scale variability processes. Under the hypothesis that these processes are explained better by considering atmospheric fields over the Mediterranean region, we proceed by extracting EOFs over the Mediterranean domain (25 to 50 North, and −10 to 40 East), and we identify, for the first time in this region, year-round weather regimes. This allows for a systematic detection of extremes that is not limited to a specific season but throughout the year. After describing each regime pattern and corresponding average conditions (temperature, precipitation), we explore their links to extreme precipitations in the area and finally compare results with EAT-WRs to assess which WR domain is more closely related to these events.