How do land-use changes shape future extreme temperatures across Europe?

In recent decades, Europe has experienced a clear increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, a trend projected to intensify under future climate change. Understanding the processes that modulate extreme heat is therefore critical. While land-use and land-cover changes (LULC) strongly affect surface energy and water exchanges, their role in shaping extreme temperatures at regional scales remains insufficiently explored, particularly under future climate scenarios.

Here, we investigate how LUC modulates extreme temperatures and heatwaves over Europe under the SSP3-7.0 scenario using high-resolution regional climate simulations performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF v4.5.1.4) model. The simulations analyzed contribute to both the EURO-CORDEX framework and the Flagship Pilot Study LUCAS (Land Use and Climate Across Scales). A standard EURO-CORDEX future experiment with fixed LULC is compared with a corresponding simulation following LUCAS Phase 2, in which LULC evolves annually, allowing the assessment of transient LULC effects under future climate conditions.

Extreme temperature days are identified using percentile-based thresholds of daily maximum temperature, and heatwaves are defined as periods of consecutive exceedances with varying durations. To enable a consistent comparison of event intensity across experiments, temperature and land-surface variables are normalized using seasonal interquartile ranges. Changes in the frequency, duration, and magnitude of extreme heat events are analyzed over Europe and across sub-regional domains.

This analysis aims to quantify the sensitivity of future extreme temperatures to LULC change and to assess the role of land-atmosphere interactions in modulating heat extremes under climate change conditions. The results will contribute to a better understanding of how land management choices may influence future extreme heat risk across Europe.

 

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support from the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, I.P./MCTES) through national funds (PIDDAC): LA/P/0068/2020 - https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0068/2020, UID/50019/2025, https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/PRR/50019/2025, UID/PRR2/50019/2025.

L.C.S. and R.M.C. also acknowledge individual funding from FCT, I.P./MCTES grants https://doi.org/10.54499/UI/BD/154675/2023, and https://doi.org/10.54499/2021.01280.CEECIND/CP1650/CT0006.