Linking Atlantic seasonal climate variability to heatwave occurrence over Europe
In the past two decades, Europe has suffered from major heatwaves: the extreme heat event that occurred in 2003 caused around 30.000 deaths, and in 2015, 2018 and 2019 many European cities were subject to record-breaking temperatures. Hence, being able to know in advance that a heatwave might occur would be of tremendous benefit for planning. However, is it possible to make informed statements about a potentially upcoming heatwave several months in advance? One potential candidate for memory in the climate system that might enable us to make statement about a potentially upcoming heatwave, is the Atlantic Ocean. The present project aims to tackle a potential influence of the North Atlantic ocean on European summer extremes in a systematic way. As a first step, we will analyze the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Grand Ensemble (MPI-GE), consisting of 100 simulations from 1850 to 2005. We will compare the frequency and occurrence of heat extremes to re-analysis. As a second step, we will implement statistical methods to automatically detect past heatwave events, and analyze the Atlantic Ocean’s behavior during spring. Using state-of-art methods, such as Machine Learning (ML) and non-gaussian verification techniques, we will investigate which regions of the Atlantic Ocean play a major role in the occurrence of heatwaves over Europe. With such a robust identification and description of potential North Atlantic SST pre-cursors for European summer extremes, we will aim to improve seasonal heatwave predictions in a final step.
Institution: University Hamburg
Contact: Goratz Beobide Arsuaga, André Düsterhus, Johanna Baehr