Trends and low-frequency variability of storminess over western Europe, 1878–2007

This study analyzes extremes of geostrophic wind speeds derived from sub-daily surface pressure observations at 13 sites in the European region from the Iberian peninsula to Scandinavia for the period from 1878 or later to 2007. It extends previous studies on storminess conditions in the Northeast (NE) Atlantic-European region. It also briefly discusses the relationship between storminess and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The results show that storminess conditions in the region from the Northeast Atlantic to western Europe have undergone substantial decadal or longer time scale fluctuations, with considerable seasonal and regional differences (especially between winter and summer, and between the British Isles-North Sea area and other parts of the region). In the North Sea and the Alps areas, there has been a notable increase in the occurrence frequency of strong geostrophic winds from the mid to the late twentieth century. The results also show that, in the cold season (December–March), the NAO-storminess relationship is significantly positive in the north-central part of this region, but negative in the south-southeastern part.     

Comment on “Trends and low frequency variability of extra-tropical cyclone activity in the ensemble of twentieth century reanalysis” by Xiaolan L. Wang,Y. Feng,G. P. Compo,V. R. Swail,F. W. Zwiers,R. J. Allan,and P. D. Sardeshmukh,Climate Dynamics, 2012

The main subject of this article is to comment on the issue of storminess trends derived from the twentieth century reanalysis (20CR) and from observations in the North Atlantic region written about in Wang et al. (Clim Dyn 40(11–12):2775–2800, 2012). The statement that the 20CR estimates would be consistent with storminess derived from pressure-based proxies does not hold for the time prior to 1950.     

Observed and projected climate change in the European region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries according to Feddema

Climate change in the European region during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is analyzed according to Feddema’s method. Precipitation and air temperature data from the twentieth century are taken from the Climatic Research Unit, while data for the twenty-first century are taken from the ENSEMBLES climate change project. The latter were bias-corrected to ensure homogeneity across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Climate classes based on monthly and annual values of potential evapotranspiration, precipitation and their ratio, are defined for 30-year averages, from which trend and spatial agreement analysis are calculated. There are separate classes for annual values and for intra-annual variation. The results indicate that the change of annual climate characteristics will be much more intense in the twenty-first than it was in the twentieth century. The dominant process in the projections is warming, mostly via cold to cool (about 45% of grid points) in north Europe and cool to warm (about 8% of grid points) transformations. The second most important process is the drying of moderately moist classes affecting about 10% of the grid points in south Europe. Changes in intra-annual variability classes are more common than changes in the annual ones during the twentieth century. The chance of increase in intra-annual temperature variation from high to extreme is about 5% during the course of the twentieth century, and about 10% in the following century.     

Multi-model projections of twenty-first century North Pacific winter wave climate under the IPCC A2 scenario

A dynamical wave model implemented over the North Pacific Ocean was forced with winds from three coupled global climate models (CGCMs) run under a medium-to-high scenario for greenhouse gas emissions through the twenty-first century. The results are analyzed with respect to changes in upper quantiles of significant wave height (90th and 99th percentile H_S) during boreal winter. The three CGCMs produce surprisingly similar patterns of change in winter wave climate during the century, with waves becoming 10–15 % smaller over the lower mid-latitudes of the North Pacific, particularly in the central and western ocean. These decreases are closely associated with decreasing windspeeds along the southern flank of the main core of the westerlies. At higher latitudes, 99th percentile wave heights generally increase, though the patterns of change are less uniform than at lower latitudes. The increased wave heights at high latitudes appear to be due a variety of wind-related factors including both increased windspeeds and changes in the structure of the wind field, these varying from model to model. For one of the CGCMs, a commonly used statistical approach for estimating seasonal quantiles of H_S on the basis of seasonal mean sea level pressure (SLP) is used to develop a regression model from 60 years of twentieth century data as a training set, and then applied using twenty-first century SLP data. The statistical model reproduces the general pattern of decreasing twenty-first century wave heights south of ~40 N, but underestimates the magnitude of the changes by ~50–70 %, reflecting relatively weak coupling between sea level pressure and wave heights in the CGCM data and loss of variability in the statistically projected wave heights.     

Three centuries of Slovakian drought dynamics

Tree-ring data from Slovakia are used to reconstruct decadal-scale fluctuations of the self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index (scPDSI) over 1744–2006. The ring width chronology correlates at 0.58 (annual) and 0.88 (decadal) with regional-scale (48–50°N and 18–20°E) summer (June–August) scPDSI variations (1901–2002). Driest and wettest years common to the tree-ring and target data are 1947, 1948, 1964, and 1916, 1927, 1938, 1941, respectively. The model indicates decadal-scale drought ~1780–1810, 1850–1870, 1940–1960, and during the late twentieth century. The wettest period occurred ~1745–1775. Instrumental measurements and documentary evidence allow the reconstructed drought extremes to be verified and also provide additional insights on associated synoptic drivers and socioeconomic impacts. Comparison of anomalous dry conditions with European-scale fields of 500 hPa geopotential height retains positive pressure anomalies centered over Central Europe leading to atmospheric stability, subsidence and dry conditions. Negative mid-tropospheric geopotential height anomalies over Western Europe are connected with anomalous wet conditions over Slovakia. Nine existing, annually resolved hydro-climatic reconstructions from Central Europe, which were herein considered for comparison with the Slovakian findings, reveal significant high- to low-frequency coherency among the majority of records. Differences between the Slovakian and the other reconstructions are most evident at the end of the nineteenth century.     

Support for global climate reorganization during the “Medieval Climate Anomaly”

Widely distributed proxy records indicate that the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA; ~900–1350 AD) was characterized by coherent shifts in large-scale Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation patterns. Although cooler sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific can explain some aspects of medieval circulation changes, they are not sufficient to account for other notable features, including widespread aridity through the Eurasian sub-tropics, stronger winter westerlies across the North Atlantic and Western Europe, and shifts in monsoon rainfall patterns across Africa and South Asia. We present results from a full-physics coupled climate model showing that a slight warming of the tropical Indian and western Pacific Oceans relative to the other tropical ocean basins can induce a broad range of the medieval circulation and climate changes indicated by proxy data, including many of those not explained by a cooler tropical Pacific alone. Important aspects of the results resemble those from previous simulations examining the climatic response to the rapid Indian Ocean warming during the late twentieth century, and to results from climate warming simulations—especially in indicating an expansion of the Northern Hemisphere Hadley circulation. Notably, the pattern of tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) change responsible for producing the proxy-model similarity in our results agrees well with MCA-LIA SST differences obtained in a recent proxy-based climate field reconstruction. Though much remains unclear, our results indicate that the MCA was characterized by an enhanced zonal Indo-Pacific SST gradient with resulting changes in Northern Hemisphere tropical and extra-tropical circulation patterns and hydroclimate regimes, linkages that may explain the coherent regional climate shifts indicated by proxy records from across the planet. The findings provide new perspectives on the nature and possible causes of the MCA—a remarkable, yet incompletely understood episode of Late Holocene climatic change.     

Multidecadal variability in local growing season during 1901–2009

Global warming exerts a lengthening effect on the growing season, with observational evidences emerging from different regions over the world. However, the difficulty for a global overview of this effect for the last century arises from limited availability of the long-term daily observations. In this study, we find a good linear relationship between the start (end) date of local growing season (LGS) and the monthly mean temperature in April (October) using the global gridded daily temperature dataset for 1960–1999. Using homogenized daily temperature records from nine stations where the time series go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, we find that the rate of change in the start (end) date of the LGS for per degree warming in April (October) mean temperature keeps nearly constant throughout the time. This enables us to study LGS changes during the last century using global gridded monthly mean temperature data. The results show that during the period 1901–2009, averaged over the observation areas, the LGS length has increased by a rate of 0.89 days decade^?1, mainly due to an earlier start (?0.58 days decade^?1). This is smaller than those estimates for the late half of the twentieth century, because of multidecadal climate variability (MDV). A MDV component of the LGS index series is extracted by using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition method. The MDV exhibits significant positive correlation with the Atlantic Multi–decadal Oscillation (AMO) over most of the Northern Hemisphere lands, but negative in parts of North America and Western Asia for start date of LGS. These are explained by analyzing differences in atmospheric circulation expressed by sea level pressure departures between the warm and cool phases of AMO. It is suggested that MDV in association with AMO accelerates the lengthening of LGS in Northern Hemisphere by 53 % for the period 1980–2009.     

Reconstruction of integrated temperature series of the past 2,000 years on the Tibetan plateau with 10-year intervals

Using 1,981 pieces of temperature records extracted from a selection of tree rings, ice cores, sediments, and other materials with high-resolution historical temperature proxy data, a temperature series of the past 2,000 years on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) with 10-year intervals was reconstructed by the method of single sample correction—multi-sample average integration equations. This series shows that the warm periods mainly appeared before 235 A.D., 775–1275 A.D. and 1845–2000 A.D., while the cold periods occurred 245–765 A.D., 1045–1145 A.D., and 1285–1835 A.D. The Little Ice Age left clear evidence on the TP and its coldest period was between 1635 and 1675 A.D. The Medieval Warm Period on the TP was not as warm as that in the late twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, overall temperature tends to be warmer with a clear rising trend, and in the late twentieth century new highs broke the record of the past 2,000 years. Power spectrum analysis shows that temperature on the TP changes consistently and evidently in a 150-year cycle. This integrated series also shows clear correlations with sunspot activity and solar radiation, as high sunspot activities generally led to warmer periods, and vice versa. Solar activities and intense radiation of recent years are naturally conducive to the global warming since the nineteenth century. The combination of greenhouse gases and natural fluctuations in climate has been the main culprit behind the global warming in the twentieth century.     

Reconstruction of historical pressure patterns over Japan using two-point pressure–temperature datasets since the nineteenth century

The temperature and pressure differences between Tokyo and Nagasaki were used to reconstruct past climate conditions. January and July in each available year since the 1820s were classified into several types with characteristic sea level atmospheric pressure patterns. This results in 18 years of pre-1881 data and a continuous series thereafter. The series indicate that the warming after 1900 (after the end of the so-called Little Ice Age) and again after 1960 can at least partly be attributed to an increase in the frequency of warm circulation pattern types at the expense of cold types. The difference in nature of the shifts in circulation types that occurred in the late nineteenth century compared with that in the late twentieth centuries suggests that the mechanism behind the warming in the late nineteenth century differs from that in the late twentieth century.     

Mediterranean drought fluctuation during the last 500 years based on tree-ring data

A 2.5 × 2.5° gridded summer (April–September) drought reconstruction over the larger Mediterranean land area (32.5°/47.5°N, 10°W/50°E; 152 grid points) is described, based on a network of 165 tree-ring series. The drought index used is the self-calibrated Palmer Drought Severity Index, and the period considered is 1500–2000. The reconstruction technique combines an analogue technique for the estimation of missing tree-ring data with an artificial neural network for optimal non-linear calibration, including a bootstrap error assessment. Tests were carried out on the various sources of error in the reconstructions. Errors related to the temporal variations of the number of proxies were tested by comparing four reconstructions calibrated with four different sized regressor datasets, representing the decrease in the number of available proxies over time. Errors related to the heterogeneous spatial density of predictors were tested using pseudo-proxies, provided by the global climate model ECHO-G. Finally the errors related to the imperfect climate signal recorded by tree-ring series were tested by adding white noise to the pseudo-proxies. Reconstructions pass standard cross-validation tests. Nevertheless tests using pseudo-proxies show that the reconstructions are less good in areas where proxies are rare, but that the average reconstruction curve is robust. Finally, the noise added to proxies, which is by definition a high frequency component, has a major effect on the low frequency signal, but not on the medium frequencies. The comparison of the low frequency trends of our mean reconstruction and the GCM simulation indicates that the detrending method used is able to preserve the long-term variations of reconstructed PDSI. The results also highlight similar multi-decadal PDSI variations in the central and western parts of the Mediterranean basin and less clear low frequency changes in the east. The sixteenth and the first part of the seventeenth centuries are characterized by marked dry episodes in the west similar to those observed in the end of the twentieth century. In contrast, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Little Ice Age) are characterized by dominant wet periods. In the eastern part of the Mediterranean basin the observed strong drought period of the end of the twentieth century seems to be the strongest of the last 500 years.     

Perspectives of Northern Sea Route and Northwest Passage in the twenty-first century

The ability of modern climate models to simulate ice season length in the Arctic, its recent changes and navigation season on Arctic marine routes along the Eurasian and the North American coastlines is evaluated using satellite ice cover observations for 1979–2007. Simulated mean sea ice season duration fits remarkably well to satellite observations and so do the simulated 20th century changes using historical forcing. This provides confidence to extend the analysis to projections for the twenty-first century. The navigation season for the Northern Sea Route (NSR) and Northwest Passage (NWP), alternative sea routes from the North Atlantic to Asia, will considerably increase during this century. The models predict prolongation of the season with a free passage from 3 to 6 months for the NSR and from 2 to 4 months for the NWP by the end of twenty-first century according to A1B scenario of the IPCC. This suggests that transit through the NSR from Western Europe to the Far East may be up to 15% more profitable in comparison to Suez Canal transit by the end of the twenty-first century.     

Recently increased tropical cyclone activity and inferences concerning coastal erosion and inland hydrological regimes in New Zealand and Eastern Australia

For the area bounded by 0–35 °S latitude and 105 °E–105 °W longitude a significant increase of tropical cyclone frequency occurred about 1954–55 and this regime persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Probably this frequency increase was accompanied by an increase of cyclonic storm intensity. It was related to an atmospheric pressure regime change over Australasia which commenced in early 1954. Tropical cyclones produce large rainfall amounts and strong winds which generate high-energy sea waves. Severe damage can result on land and at sea. However, much recently recorded damage has resulted from extra-tropical cyclones. Therefore it is postulated that extra-tropical cyclones also increased in frequency after the mid 1950s and that both types of cyclone contributed to a significant increase in total storminess. In eastern Australia and around both islands of New Zealand a major coastal regime change occurred in the 1950s and has persisted to the present;erosion has been the dominant process. In eastern Australia there was a significant increase in the magnitude of river floods after the late 1940s. After the mid 1950s most of the North Island of New Zealand experienced the wettest years of this century which caused large closed lakes to reach the highest levels for several centuries. Throughout the North Island the majority of the greatest recorded stream floods of this century have occurred during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. And in forested mountain areas of the North Island the average rate of erosion and alluvial sedimentation increased markedly after the mid 1950s. The regime change of each natural phenomenon is explicable in terms of increased storminess since the mid 1950s. Consequently it is hypothesised that the coastal and inland environmental regime changes discussed were either initiated or accentuated after the mid 1950s as a result of increased activity of both tropical and extra-tropical cyclones. Some further studies, necessary to test the links in the overall hypothesis, are mentioned.     

Sensitivity of climate change projections to uncertainties in the estimates of observed changes in deep-ocean heat content

The MIT 2D climate model is used to make probabilistic projections for changes in global mean surface temperature and for thermosteric sea level rise under a variety of forcing scenarios. The uncertainties in climate sensitivity and rate of heat uptake by the deep ocean are quantified by using the probability distributions derived from observed twentieth century temperature changes. The impact on climate change projections of using the smallest and largest estimates of twentieth century deep ocean warming is explored. The impact is large in the case of global mean thermosteric sea level rise. In the MIT reference (“business as usual”) scenario the median rise by 2100 is 27 and 43 cm in the respective cases. The impact on increases in global mean surface air temperature is more modest, 4.9 and 3.9 C in the two respective cases, because of the correlation between climate sensitivity and ocean heat uptake required by twentieth century surface and upper air temperature changes. The results are also compared with the projections made by the IPCC AR4’s multi-model ensemble for several of the SRES scenarios. The multi-model projections are more consistent with the MIT projections based on the largest estimate of ocean warming. However, the range for the rate of heat uptake by the ocean suggested by the lowest estimate of ocean warming is more consistent with the range suggested by the twentieth century changes in surface and upper air temperatures, combined with the expert prior for climate sensitivity.     

Witnessing North Atlantic westerlies variability from ships’ logbooks (1685–2008)

A monthly index based on the persistence of the westerly winds over the English Chanel is constructed for 1685–2008 using daily data from ships’ logbooks and comprehensive marine meteorological datasets. The so-called Westerly Index (WI) provides the longest instrumental record of atmospheric circulation currently available. Anomalous WI values are associated with spatially coherent climatic signals in temperature and precipitation over large areas of Europe, which are stronger for precipitation than for temperature and in winter and summer than in transitional seasons. Overall, the WI series accord with the known European climatic history, and reveal that the frequency of the westerlies in the eastern Atlantic during the twentieth century and the Late Maunder Minimum was not exceptional in the context of the last three centuries. It is shown that the WI provides additional and complementary information to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) indices. The analysis of WI series during the industrial era indicates an overall good agreement with the winter and high-summer NAO, with the exception of several multidecadal periods of weakened correlation. These decoupled periods between the frequency and the intensity of the zonal flow are interpreted on the basis of several sources of non-stationarity affecting the centres of the variability of the North Atlantic and their teleconnections. Comparisons with NAO reconstructions and long instrumental indices extending back to the seventeenth century suggest that similar situations have occurred in the past, which call for caution when reconstructing the past atmospheric circulation from climatic proxies. The robustness and extension of its climatic signal, the length of the series and its instrumental nature make the WI an excellent benchmark for proxy calibration in Europe and Greenland.     

Twentieth century variability of surface humidity as the climate change indicator in Kraków (Southern Poland)

Air humidity is an element that plays an important role among meteorological processes within the atmosphere; however, the variety of humidity indices makes the global view of air moisture changes difficult. Long-term variability of air humidity in Kraków was examined by time-series (1901–2000) analysis of vapour pressure and saturation deficit values and their characteristic days with the background of temperature and saturated vapour pressure changes. Long-term variability of air humidity in Kraków has been visible above all in variations of saturation deficit. It should be connected with the contemporary temperature growth and the city development as the atmospheric water vapour content (described by vapour pressure) becomes relatively stable (with no significant tendencies). The parameter showed well-marked trends over the examined period. The growth of saturation deficit values predominated in the warm half of a year (above all in August: an increase in SD value by 3.0 hPa per century). Apart from atmospheric circulation variability, gradual rise in the number of inhabitants and higher development density contributed to the decline in the city’s air humidity; however, the causes of changes in air humidity should be also attributed to natural factors, mainly to variation of air circulation reinforced by the operation of anthropogenic factors. Using air humidity as the indicator, the results that confirm climatic fluctuations in central Europe in the twentieth century obtained earlier were verified and some new aspects of present climate change were given.     

The response of the South Asian Summer Monsoon circulation to intensified irrigation in global climate model simulations

Agricultural intensification in South Asia has resulted in the expansion and intensification of surface irrigation over the twentieth century. The resulting changes to the surface energy balance could affect the temperature contrasts between the South Asian land surface and the equatorial Indian Ocean, potentially altering the South Asian Summer Monsoon (SASM) circulation. Prior studies have noted apparent declines in the monsoon intensity over the twentieth century and have focused on how altered surface energy balances impact the SASM rainfall distribution. Here, we use the coupled Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE-R general circulation model to investigate the impact of intensifying irrigation on the large-scale SASM circulation over the twentieth century, including how the effect of irrigation compares to the impact of increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) forcing. We force our simulations with time-varying, historical estimates of irrigation, both alone and with twentieth century GHGs and other forcings. In the irrigation only experiment, irrigation rates correlate strongly with lower and upper level temperature contrasts between the Indian sub-continent and the Indian Ocean (Pearson’s r = ?0.66 and r = ?0.46, respectively), important quantities that control the strength of the SASM circulation. When GHG forcing is included, these correlations strengthen: r = ?0.72 and r = ?0.47 for lower and upper level temperature contrasts, respectively. Under irrigated conditions, the mean SASM intensity in the model decreases only slightly and insignificantly. However, in the simulation with irrigation and GHG forcing, inter-annual variability of the SASM circulation decreases by ~40 %, consistent with trends in the reanalysis products. This suggests that the inclusion of irrigation may be necessary to accurately simulate the historical trends and variability of the SASM system over the last 50 years. These findings suggest that intensifying irrigation, in concert with increased GHG forcing, is capable of reducing the variability of the simulated SASM circulation and altering the regional moisture transport by limiting the surface warming and reducing land–sea temperature gradients.     

Future climate in the Pacific Northwest

Climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) on the whole reproduce the observed seasonal cycle and twentieth century warming trend of 0.8°C (1.5°F) in the Pacific Northwest, and point to much greater warming for the next century. These models project increases in annual temperature of, on average, 1.1°C (2.0°F) by the 2020s, 1.8°C (3.2°F) by the 2040s, and 3.0°C (5.3°F) by the 2080s, compared with the average from 1970 to 1999, averaged across all climate models. Rates of warming range from 0.1°C to 0.6°C (0.2°F to 1.0°F) per decade. Projected changes in annual precipitation, averaged over all models, are small (+1% to +2%), but some models project an enhanced seasonal cycle with changes toward wetter autumns and winters and drier summers. Changes in nearshore sea surface temperatures, though smaller than on land, are likely to substantially exceed interannual variability, but coastal upwelling changes little. Rates of twenty-first century sea level rise will depend on poorly known factors like ice sheet instability in Greenland and Antarctica, and could be as low as twentieth century values (20 cm, 8^″) or as large as 1.3 m (50^″).     

A new index for variations in the position of the South Pacific convergence zone 1910/11–2011/2012

Quality controlled and recently homogenised mean sea level pressure records for the South Pacific are used to specify the location and variability of the South Pacific convergence zone (SPCZ) during the austral warm season (November–April). The SPCZ is the world’s largest rainfall band during the austral summer, when it dominates the climate of the South Pacific. A new index called the South Pacific convergence zone index (SPCZI) is derived, and is shown to be coherent with changes in low level wind convergence associated with the SPCZ. This index replaces the earlier SPCZ position index because it uses higher quality mean sea level pressure data than the superseded index and extends the time series further forward in time. The SPCZI allows interannual to decadal variability in the climate of the South Pacific to be tracked for more than a century from 1910/1911 to 2011/2012. During El Niño episodes the SPCZ is displaced by about 1°–3° east, and La Niña events 1°–3° west of the mean position on average. The index indicates a striking movement eastward for the period 1977/78–1998/99, compared with 1944/45–1976/77 in association with the Interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO). The eastward movement of the SPCZ in the late twentieth century is related to significant precipitation trends in the South Pacific region. Since 1998/99 the SPCZ has regressed westward with the negative phase change of the IPO. The long-term trend in the SPCZI is very small relative to the interannual to decadal variability and is not statistically significant, suggesting that there has been little overall change in the mean position of the SPCZ over the past century.     

A new atmospheric proxy for sea level variability in the southeastern North Sea: observations and future ensemble projections

Atmosphere–ocean interactions are known to dominate seasonal to decadal sea level variability in the southeastern North Sea. In this study an atmospheric proxy for the observed sea level variability in the German Bight is introduced. Monthly mean sea level (MSL) time series from 13 tide gauges located in the German Bight and one virtual station record are evaluated in comparison to sea level pressure fields over the North Atlantic and Europe. A quasi-linear relationship between MSL in the German Bight and sea level pressure over Scandinavia and the Iberian Peninsula is found. This relationship is used (1) to evaluate the atmospheric contribution to MSL variability in hindcast experiments over the period from 1871–2008 with data from the twentieth century reanalysis v2 (20CRv2), (2) to isolate the high frequency meteorological variability of MSL from longer-term changes, (3) to derive ensemble projections of the atmospheric contribution to MSL until 2100 with eight different coupled global atmosphere–ocean models (AOGCM’s) under the A1B emission scenario and (4) two additional projections for one AOGCM (ECHAM5/MPI-OM) under the B1 and A2 emission scenarios. The hindcast produces a reasonable good reconstruction explaining approximately 80 % of the observed MSL variability over the period from 1871 to 2008. Observational features such as the divergent seasonal trend development in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e. larger trends from January to March compared to the rest of the year, and regional variations along the German North Sea coastline in trends and variability are well described. For the period from 1961 to 1990 the Kolmogorov-Smirnow test is used to evaluate the ability of the eight AOGCMs to reproduce the observed statistical properties of MSL variations. All models are able to reproduce the statistical distribution of atmospheric MSL. For the target year 2100 the models point to a slight increase in the atmospheric component of MSL with generally larger changes during winter months (October–March). Largest MSL changes in the order of ~5–6 cm are found for the high emission scenario A2, whereas the moderate B1 and intermediate A1B scenarios lead to moderate changes in the order of ~3 cm. All models point to an increasing atmospheric contribution to MSL in the German Bight, but the uncertainties are considerable, i.e. model and scenario uncertainties are in the same order of magnitude.     

Long-term summer temperature variations in the Pyrenees

Two hundred and sixty one newly measured tree-ring width and density series from living and dry-dead conifers from two timberline sites in the Spanish Pyrenees were compiled. Application of the regional curve standardization method for tree-ring detrending allowed the preservation of inter-annual to multi-centennial scale variability. The new density record correlates at 0.53 (0.68 in the higher frequency domain) with May–September maximum temperatures over the 1944–2005 period. Reconstructed warmth in the fourteenth to fifteenth and twentieth century is separated by a prolonged cooling from ∼1450 to 1850. Six of the ten warmest decades fall into the twentieth century, whereas the remaining four are reconstructed for the 1360–1440 interval. Comparison with novel density-based summer temperature reconstructions from the Swiss Alps and northern Sweden indicates decadal to longer-term similarity between the Pyrenees and Alps, but disagreement with northern Sweden. Spatial field correlations with instrumental data support the regional differentiation of the proxy records. While twentieth century warmth is evident in the Alps and Pyrenees, recent temperatures in Scandinavia are relatively cold in comparison to earlier warmth centered around medieval times, ∼1450, and the late eighteenth century. While coldest summers in the Alps and Pyrenees were in-phase with the Maunder and Dalton solar minima, lowest temperatures in Scandinavia occurred later at the onset of the twentieth century. However, fairly cold summers at the end of the fifteenth century, between ∼1600–1700, and ∼1820 were synchronized over Europe, and larger areas of the Northern Hemisphere.