Ocean and atmosphere influence on the 2015 European heatwave

Mecking, J V; Drijfhout, S S; Hirschi, J J-M; Blaker, A T ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5454-0131. 2019 Ocean and atmosphere influence on the 2015 European heatwave. Environmental Research Letters, 14 (11). 114035. 10.1088/1748-9326/ab4d33

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Abstract/Summary

During the summer of 2015, central Europe experienced a major heatwave that was preceded by anomalously cold sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the northern North Atlantic. Recent observation-based studies found a correlation between North Atlantic SST in spring and European summer temperatures, suggesting potential for predictability. Here we show, by using a high-resolution climate model, that ocean temperature anomalies, in combination with matching atmospheric and sea-ice initial conditions were key to the development of the 2015 European heatwave. In a series of 30-member ensemble simulations we test different combinations of ocean temperature and salinity initial states versus non-initialised climatology, mediated in both ensembles by different atmospheric/sea-ice initial conditions, using a non-standard initialisation method without data-assimilation. With the best combination of the initial ocean, and matching atmosphere/sea-ice initial conditions, the ensemble mean temperature response over central Europe in this set-up equals 60% of the observed anomaly, with 6 out of 30 ensemble-members showing similar, or even larger surface air temperature anomalies than observed.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1088/1748-9326/ab4d33
ISSN:	1748-9326
Date made live:	21 Nov 2019 19:30 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/525959

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