This session will focus on the investigation of new indicators to characterize and understand meteorological, hydrological, and bio-geochemical processes in these critically endangered areas. Specific topics of interest include:
● Changes in mean climate, but also variability, frequency, and intensity of extreme events for the main climatological variables (e.g. precipitation, temperature, snow depth) to identify impacts on the ecological and hydrological systems.
● The effects of climate change on surface gas fluxes and in particular on carbon cycling.
● Feedback mechanisms between the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the soil, including the effects of changes in land use and land cover.
● Adaptation strategies and management practices that can help mitigate the impacts of climate change in extreme environments.
● Comparisons between proxy data from natural archives before and during the last 150 years and the introduction of instrumental measurements.
This session aims also at identifying the key research gaps and provide recommendations for future research to better understand and manage the effects of climate change in critical environments.
The Mediterranean region is a focal point for wildfires. Climate change is projected to affect the Mediterranean hydrological cycle, resulting in intensified drought conditions and increased fire hazard. Even though northern Italy is rich in water resources, wildfires have become increasingly prevalent in recent decades, occurring not only during the summer but also in the winter season.
This study explores the climatic drivers influencing the monthly burned area (BA) during both summer and winter fire seasons in northern Italy from 2007 to 2022.
The GPS-based BA perimeters analysed here are provided by the monitoring campaigns performed by the Carabinieri Command of Units for Forestry, Environmental, and Agri-food protection. For each summer ( May - October) and winter (November -April) fire season, the monthly percentage of burned area at 0.11 degrees of resolution for the 2007-2022 period was obtained. A total of 150 daily precipitation and maximum and minimum ground station series were collected, converted at monthly scale, reconstructed, homogenised and spatialised at 0.11° resolution by mean of Universal Kriging with auxiliary variables. Subsequently, several climatic indices were computed for precipitation (Precipitation, Consecutive Dry Days (CDD) and Consecutive Wet Days (CWD)), temperature (Maximum and Minimum Temperature and Potential Evapotranspiration (ET0)) and drought (Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) Standardised Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Water Balance (WB)). The Pearson’s correlation test between the detrended monthly time series of BA and of climatic indices was performed for each pixel and for both the summer and winter seasons. Only the strongest and significant correlations between BA and climatic indices were retained to identify the best BA predictors. Based on the CORINE Land Cover map, for each season the vegetation classes that were most susceptible to wildfires, and their typical elevation ranges, were identified.
This study highlights different types of behaviour between summer and winter wildfires. Specifically, summer fires predominantly affect vegetation classes located in the plains, such as evergreen broadleaf forests and natural vegetation mixed with croplands. By contrast, winter wildfires target deciduous broadleaf forests located between 800 and 1000 m. a.s.l..
How to cite: Baronetti, A., Fiorucci, P., and Provenzale, A.: Climatic drivers for summer and winter wildfire burned area in northern Italy, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-1134, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-1134, 2024.
How to cite: Wetterhall, F., Di Giuseppe, F., and El Garroussi, S.: Tenfold Increase in extreme fires in Europe expected under warming climate, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-1051, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-1051, 2024.
We show that the fraction of Earth’s surface area receiving daily precipitation is closely connected to the global statistics of local wet-day frequency and mean precipitation intensity. Our analysis, based on the ERA5 reanalysis, revealed a close match between the global mean surface temperature and both the total mass of 24-h precipitation falling on Earth’s surface as well as surface area receiving 24-h precipitation in the ERA5 data, highlighting the dependency between the greenhouse effect and the global hydrological cycle. Moreover, the total planetary precipitation and the global daily precipitation area represent links between the global warming and extreme precipitation amounts that traditionally have not been included in sets of essential climate indicators. Hence, both the total amount of precipitation falling on Earth’s surface and the fraction of the surface area on which it falls represent two key global climate indicators for Earth’s global hydrological cycle. Furthermore, the global surface area fraction of daily precipitation is connected with the global statistics of local wet-day frequencies in addition to the mean precipitation intensity. Previous work suggest that these two parameters can be used to get approximate estimates of probability for heavy daily precipitation amounts. Based on these results, we argue that the present set of global climate indicators should be extended to include the total global daily precipitation and the fraction of Earth's surface area receiving daily precipitation. It's also useful to compute the fractional global surface area with daily precipitation exceeding thresholds such as 30 mm/day and 50 mm/day.
How to cite: Benestad, R., Lussana, C., and Dobler, A.: There is a link between the global surface area receiving daily precipitation, global precipitation and theglobal mean temperature, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-135, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-135, 2024.
Caves are some of the most understudied ecosystems on Earth. However, they are of great interest for their stable climate and for the most specialized biodiversity that caves host. Thanks to the PRIN project, Biodiversity conservation goes DEEP: integrating subterranean ecosystems into climate CHANGE agendas and biodiversity targets we can improve our understanding on subterranean environments to fill the biological and climatic knowledge gaps. To best study underground systems dynamics an interdisciplinary study is conducted merging meteorological and ecological disciplines.
Within a two years time frame, the project's workflow runs through the understanding the impacts of global change, creating models to predict the future consequences on different scenarios and implementing conservation programs to protect these ecosystems.
Seven caves in Western Alps have been selected as benchmark caves. Taxonomic and functional traits data are collected by on-site samplings and literature reviews to create a distribution and functional model of subterranean taxa.
Abiotic data are collected through monitoring cave temperatures continuously from 2020 until today and can be compared with previous data of 2012.
We created a quality control protocol for the internal cave temperature data structured in three fundamental steps: standardizing the interval between consecutive records every 6 hours; removing sudden temperature breaks using a mobile variance measure; considering the gaps to evaluate the reliability for future studies.
Analysis of cave meteorology is run to identify the thermal responses within caves compared to surface environments. Preliminary application of this QC procedure, one of the most stable caves of our dataset, has demonstrated its effectiveness in isolating relevant temporal frames and enhancing data reliability. Our first case study points out an average increase of 0.28°C from 2012 and the cave internal temperature shows a constant increase from 2020 to 2023.
The absence of a standardized approach for managing cave temperature data presents an
opportunity for innovation. We introduce a scalable and adaptable quality control protocol, designed to be generalizable across different environmental studies.
The results can be merged with ecological modelling to obtain a process-based prediction of biodiversity change in subterranean systems. Based on this model, hotspots of conservation value can be identified to create a dynamic network of protected areas that considers climate-driven shifts insubterranean ecoregions.
This protocol not only enhances data integritybut also sets a new benchmark for future research insubterranean climate analysis.
How to cite: Cimenti, A., Cresi, L., Acquaotta, F., Senese, A., Isaia, M., Piano, E., Nicolosi, G., Pisani, O., Piquet, A., and Mammola, S.: Studying the effect of climate change in underground systems. A Novel Quality Control Workflow for Subterranean Temperature Data, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-784, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-784, 2024.
In boreal regions, trends in biologically relevant climate variables (i.e., bioclimate) over protected areas (PAs), important for biodiversity, have largely remained unquantified. Here, we investigated the changes and variability of 11 bioclimatic variables of both seasonally-integrated variables and extreme-events across Finland during the period 1961–2020 using a gridded climatology. Our results highlight significant changes in growing season temperature over the entire study area, whereas, e.g., annual precipitation sum and April–September water balance have increased especially in the central and northern parts of Finland. Moreover, we found substantial spatial variation in bioclimatic variables over the 631 studied PAs describing e.g. snow conditions and number of frost days in spring with absent snow cover, reflecting the changing exposure of biota to frost. The observed increases in accumulation of heat in the southern boreal zone and more frequent rain-on-snow events in the northern boreal zone can be important for the drought tolerance and winter survival of species, respectively. A multivariate ordination analysis suggested that the main dimensions of bioclimate change in PAs vary by vegetation zones. For example, in the southern boreal zone the changes are mostly related to annual and growing season temperatures, whereas in the middle boreal zone the changes are related to altered moisture and snow conditions. Our findings underpin the marked spatial variation in bioclimatic trends and climate vulnerability in northern Europe. The large suite of bioclimatic indicators provides new understanding of how climate change is manifesting over the northernmost Europe with sensitive ecosystems, and helps to develop biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.
How to cite: Aalto, J., Lehtonen, I., Pirinen, P., Aapala, K., Laurila, T. K., Gregow, H., and Heikkinen, R. K.: Observed bioclimatic changes across the protected area network of Finland , EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-443, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-443, 2024.
Land use and land cover changes (LULCC), driven by human activities such as urbanization, afforestation or agricultural expansion, alter land surface properties. These alterations can lead to modifications in energy and water fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere, thereby influencing the local and regional climate. Due to forests’ ability to sequester carbon, climate-resilient forest management is pivotal in climate change adaptation and mitigation, and its effects and feedbacks have to be well understood. However, in regional climate modeling, LULCC is often neglected, and the land cover is represented with a static land use and land cover map. Therefore, the WCRP CORDEX flagship pilot study LUCAS (Land Use and Climate Across Scales) aims to assess the impact of LULCC on regional climate with a coordinated regional climate model ensemble approach. A realistic implementation of LULCC into regional climate models requires consideration of transient LULCC. The LUCAS LUC dataset, developed by Hoffmann et al. (2023) provides these transient LULCC on high resolution suitable for regional climate modeling. The dataset is based on the plant functional type (PFT) distribution derived from the ESA-CCI LC dataset and provides annual LULCC based on the LUH2 dataset until the end of the century for different SSP scenarios and the historical period 1950–2014.
As a collaboration between the FPS LUCAS and the EU Horizon project OptFor-EU, we aim to investigate the impact of LULCC, in particular of forest cover changes on the regional climate. Therefore, we implemented the LUCAS LUC dataset in our regional climate model system REMO2020-iMOVE. We use REMO in its hydrostatic configuration and couple it interactively to the mosaic-based vegetation module iMOVE, which represents the PFT distribution with land cover tiles. Our simulations cover Europe on a 12 km horizontal resolution. In the first step, our simulations are driven by the reanalysis data of ERA5.1 from 1979 – 2020, which we evaluate against observational data. In the second step, we conduct simulations driven by the global earth system model MPI-ESM-HR for the historical and the future period until the end of the century, under the SSP126 scenario with corresponding greenhouse gas forcing and LULCC data.
By comparing the simulations that employ transient LULCC with those that employ static LULCC maps, we are able to quantify the impact of forest cover changes on regional climate in Europe.
Reference
Hoffmann, P., Reinhart, V., Rechid, D., de Noblet-Ducoudré, N., Davin, E. L., Asmus, C., Bechtel, B., Böhner, J., Katragkou, E., and Luyssaert, S.: High-resolution land use and land cover dataset for regional climate modelling: historical and future changes in Europe, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 3819–3852, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-15-3819-2023, 2023.
How to cite: Asmus, C., Hoffmann, P., Buntemeyer, L., Knutzen, F., Pietikäinen, J.-P., and Rechid, D.: Assessing the impact of transient land use and land cover changes in regional climate modeling using the LUCAS LUC dataset with a focus on forest cover changes in Europe, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-893, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-893, 2024.
Climate change has become one of the most significant challenges of the 21st century and although there is uncertainty surrounding the scale, scope and, pace of climate change, it is safe to say that all people are exposed. This climate crisis has a strong effect on weather patterns, such as an increase in the frequency and magnitude of adverse events, such as floods and intense rainfall. The number of people affected by these events has grown exponentially over the years and forecasts indicate that the damage caused will increase significantly in the coming years. In southern Brazil, the disasters that cause the most deaths are those of hydrometeorological origin, for example, the event that occurred in May 2024, which affected another 1.4 million people and caused 95 deaths. The lack of planning and the occupation of areas at risk of flooding end up increasing disasters, especially in cities, where more than 85% of the population lives in the South of Brazil, the most populated area. In this context, the study proposes to investigate the incidence, magnitude and, trend of occurrence of disasters associated with floods and intense and extreme rains in the South of Brazil, more specifically in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and, Paraná. The methodological procedures included the survey and analysis of spatial and temporal data on hydroclimatic disasters, associated with flooding and extreme precipitation, from the Integrated Disaster Information System S2iD, a platform of the National System and Protection and Civil Defense, of the Ministry of Integration and Regional Development of Brazil, from January 1991 to December 2023. The research results indicated the most affected cities, number of people affected, damages, estimated economic losses and, the trend shown in the evolution of such disasters. Research knowledge provides support for decision-making and management and planning actions, in order to prevent and mitigate the occurrence of disasters, in the search for sustainable and resilient cities.
How to cite: Redin Vestena, L. and Acquaotta, F.: Floods in Southern Brazil: trends and hydroclimate changes, EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-1132, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-1132, 2024.
How to cite: Albalat, A., Trapero, L., Lemus-Canovas, M., and Pons, M.: Characterizing snow seasons through the application of a new Multivariate Snow Index , EMS Annual Meeting 2024, Barcelona, Spain, 1–6 Sep 2024, EMS2024-429, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2024-429, 2024.
