EGU24-2132, updated on 11 Jun 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-2132
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

A Regional Perspective of Storyline Simulations of the Recent European Summer Heatwaves

Tatiana Klimiuk1, Patrick Ludwig1, Antonio Sánchez Benítez2, Helge Goessling2, Peter Braesicke1, and Joaquim G. Pinto1
Tatiana Klimiuk et al.
  • 1Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
  • 2Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Bremerhaven/Potsdam, Germany

Heatwaves are a major natural hazard affecting Europe, and their maximum temperatures are projected to increase strongly with climate change. In recent years, the event-based storyline approach has proven its applicability for climate change attribution studies. Constraining the large-scale dynamics to that of the recent past serves to separate the thermodynamic effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from the largely uncertain dynamic changes. Within the SCENIC project, the storylines are produced with the spectrally nudged global coupled AWI-CM1 model (90 km horizontal resolution). They are downscaled with ICON-CLM to the Euro-Cordex (12 km) and subsequently to the central European domain (3 km). Using this model chain, we captured the series of European summer heat waves and droughts of 2018-2022. We placed them into the pre-industrial climate and three environments corresponding to +2, +3, and +4 K warmer worlds. We quantified the warming rate per degree of global warming (which sometimes exceeds 2.5 over larger areas) and assessed the role of soil-atmosphere feedback in contributing to these rates. More specifically, for several European heatwaves, we explored the connection of the evaporative regime of a region affected by a heatwave to the region's response to global warming during this event. Taking advantage of the high signal-to-noise ratio of event-based storylines, we add one more dimension - the global warming level - to the scope of land-atmosphere feedback studies.

How to cite: Klimiuk, T., Ludwig, P., Sánchez Benítez, A., Goessling, H., Braesicke, P., and G. Pinto, J.: A Regional Perspective of Storyline Simulations of the Recent European Summer Heatwaves, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-2132, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-2132, 2024.