Authors: Julien Cattiaux Pascal Yiou Robert Vautard
Publish Date: 2011/10/15
Volume: 38, Issue: 9-10, Pages: 1949-1964
Abstract
European surface temperatures have increased during the past decades According to climate projections this warming is expected to continue in future years under enhanced radiative forcings In addition to the mean increase changes in temperature variability are likely to occur with more frequent extreme seasons such as those recently observed in the past decade eg summer 2003 autumn 2006 Yet most of the processes driving such longterm tendencies remain unidentified and unexplored A particularly important issue is how changes in the atmospheric dynamics over the NorthAtlantic and Europe NAE contribute to trends in both mean and extreme temperatures The high occurrence of the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation NAO in the 1980s–1990s suggested that the European warming could result from a reorganization in the main structures of the NAE dynamics However the 2000s have rather revealed an inconsistency between atmospheric circulation conditions and European temperatures Here we investigate the relationship between sealevel pressure SLP and 2m temperature T2m using a flowanalogues method applied over both observations and future projections We use 13 models of the Third phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project CMIP3 over 1961–2000 2046–2065 and 2081–2100 from which we extract seasonal subensembles with respect to their representation of observed SLPT2m seasonal relationships First we show that the distribution of SLP does not undergo major changes in future climate according to these seasonal modelensembles albeit a general decline of the variability is observed for all seasons Then using the flowanalogues we conclude that the projected European warming appears disconnected from changes in the NAE dynamics Only in winter a slight shift towards positive NAO conditions could partially contribute to the future temperature increase Finally a focus over unusually warm/cold seasons reveals that future temperature extremes should likely to be associated with similar atmospheric circulations as observed during recent onesWe acknowledge the modeling groups the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison PCMDI and the WCRP’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling WGCM for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multimodel dataset Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science US Department of Energy We also would like to thank M Lengaigne who performed the standardization processing from CMIP3 original dataset This work was supported by the French ANR project CHEDAR ANR09CEP002
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