Collection of regional climate attribution studies to educate the public in Hungary

Although anthropogenic global warming is well-known within the scientific community, the public is still not certain or even misled on how to associate specific local climate events to this global issue. Therefore, it is essential to raise public awareness by providing sound, graphical, interesting, and easily understood scientific information. Our attribution project was initiated in September 2021, and aimed at this task for Hungary. For this purpose, seasonally relevant indicators were calculated and published in each season near the time of a corresponding event occurrence, and the dissemination was done via a national platform aiming for climate awareness (www.masfelfok.hu). In addition, the public is also reached through the republishment of various media platforms, and the social media networks are used as well.

The following major issues/indicators were evaluated so far: snow frequency, cold winter anomalies, sleet, fog, vegetation start for cold-resistant and warm-demanding plants, late spring frosts and frost around blooming, heatwaves (using different thresholds), late summer-like conditions in autumn, grape stress factors, drought conditions (e.g. Forest Aridity Index, De Martonne Index, Pálfai Aridity Index, consecutive dry days), fire weather index, human comfort index (UTCI), heating and cooling degree days, precipitation extremes, etc.

The analyses were performed using several data sources with at least daily temporal resolution: (1) an ensemble of CMIP6 global climate model simulations of both natural-only forcings and historical runs with around 1° resolution, (2) an ensemble of regional climate model simulations from EURO-CORDEX with 0.11° resolution, including the RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 scenarios, (3) a fine-resolution (0.1°), homogenized observation-based gridded database (i.e. HuClim) for Hungary updated yearly, (4) a fine-resolution (0.1°), but not homogenized observation-based database (i.e. E-OBS) for Europe, (5) ECMWF Reanalysis data (ERA5 with 0.25° or ERA5-Land with 0.1° resolution) for those variables that are not available in the purely measurement-based HuClim.

Acknowledgements. This work has been implemented by the National Multidisciplinary Laboratory for Climate Change (RRF-2.3.1-21-2022-00014) project within the framework of Hungary's National Recovery and Resilience Plan supported by the Recovery and Resilience Facility of the European Union. In addition, this activity has been supported by the European Climate Fund (G-2409-68866).