Ranking European capitals by exposure to heat waves and cold waves

Description

In a warming Europe, we are witnessing a growth in urban population with aging trend, which will make the society more exposed and vulnerable to extreme weather events. In the period 1950-2015 the occurrence of extreme heat waves increased across European capitals. The cold extremes will have a decreasing tendency as global warming progresses, however, due to higher variability of future climate, the cold wave hazard may remain locally an important threat. Moreover, the heat and cold-related mortality will be enhanced with foreseen demographic evolution in European cities.

In this article the authors focus on metropolitan areas of European capitals (EU28 plus Moscow, Oslo and Zurich):by using an ensemble of eight EURO-CORDEX models under the RCP8.5 scenario, authors detected heat and cold waves events.

The results show that all the investigated European metropolitan areas will be more vulnerable to extreme heat in the coming decades. Based on the impact ranking, results reveal that cold waves will represent some threat in mid-century but they will not be the major threat in any of European capitals, and that they are projected to completely vanish by the end of this century. On the contrary, in near, but even more so in distant future, extreme heat events in European capitals will not be exclusive to traditionally exposed areas such as the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula. Heat waves will most likely strike Madrid, Rome and Athens, commonly associated with extreme temperatures, but also other cities, namely Valletta, Sofia, Wien, Zagreb, and Zurich should expect serious impacts in the future.

The ranking of European capitals based on their exposure to extreme heat is of paramount importance to decision makers in order to mitigate the heat related mortality.

This research is complemented by the MetroHeat web tool (https://cgranell.shinyapps.io/metroheat/), which is described in the Supplementary Material of the article. MetroHeat provides an open data climate service for visualising and interacting with extreme temperature indices and heat wave indicators for European capitals.

Reference information