Stakeholder relevant hazard indices in Euro-CORDEX models developed under the EU- Impetus4Change project

Europe suffers great financial loss and loss of life to extreme events every year, and while the impacts of these events may increase due to society’s increasing exposure, the hazardous events themselves are also expected to change. The accurate projection of the changes in extreme events is invaluable for many industries, including insurance, construction, and energy, but also for those stakeholders responsible for preparing the European cities to withstand future extreme events. However, such adaptation requires information that is tailored to the needs and workflow of the stakeholders.

In the EU-Impetus4Change (I4C) project, we have worked with stakeholders in four demonstrator cities across Europe to select hazard indices that are directly applicable to their ongoing work in adapting to climate change. The cities, Barcelona, Paris, Prague and Bergen, were selected because they represent a wide range of climates across Europe and face different hazardous events. There are 23 indices in total, which focus primarily on heat waves and extreme rainfall, but also include indices on drought, fire weather, and river discharge. These indices have now been calculated in 67 models from the EURO-CORDEX simulations, covering all of Europe for the period of 1980 to 2100. These indices are analyzed for both their changes over the timeseries but also at Global Warming Levels of 1, 1.5, 2, 3, and 4 degrees. In this talk we will present a description of the indices and show the first analysis of selected indices for the European domain. The full dataset of these indices is planned to be made openly available through an online, user-friendly toolkit as part of the I4C project.