“How Unusual Was Autumn 2006 in Europe?”

Van Oldenborgh, Geert Jan | from Multimedia Library Collection:
Periodicals

Van Oldenborgh, Geert Jan. “How Unusual Was Autumn 2006 in Europe?” Climate of the Past 3, no. 4 (2007): 659–668.

The temperatures in large parts of Europe have been record high during the meteorological autumn of 2006. Compared to 1961–1990, the 2-meter temperature was more than three degrees Celsius above normal from the north side of the Alps to southern Norway. This made it by far the warmest autumn on record in the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with the records in Central England going back to 1659, in the Netherlands to 1706 and in Denmark to 1768. The deviations were so large that under the obviously false assumption that the climate does not change, the observed temperatures for 2006 would occur with a probability of less than once every 10,000 years in a large part of Europe, given the distribution defined by the temperatures in the autumn 1901–2005… . [T]he warm autumn 2006 either was a very rare coincidence, or the local temperature rise is much stronger than modeled, or non-linear physics that is missing from these models increases the probability of warm extremes. (From the author’s abstract.)

2007 Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Made available on the Environment & Society Portal for nonprofit educational purposes only, courtesy of Copernicus GmbH and the European Geosciences Union.