Future Holiday Climate Index (HCI) Performance of Urban and Beach Destinations in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Tourism is a major socioeconomic contributor to established and emerging destinations in the Mediterranean region. Recent studies introducing the Holiday Climate Index (HCI) highlight the significance of climate as a factor in sustaining the competitiveness of coastal and urban destinations. The aim of this study is to assess the future HCI performance of urban and beach destinations in the greater Mediterranean region. For this purpose, HCI scores for the reference (1971–2000) and future (2021–2050, 2070–2099) periods were computed with the use of two latest greenhouse gas concentration trajectories, RCP 4.5 and 8.5, based on the Middle East North Africa (MENA) Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) domain and data. The outputs were adjusted to a 500 m resolution via the use of lapse rate corrections that extrapolate the climate model topography against a resampled digital elevation model. All periodic results were seasonally aggregated and visualized on a (web) geographical information system (GIS). The web version of the GIS also allowed for a basic climate service where any user can search her/his place of interest overlaid with index ratings. Exposure levels are revealed at the macro scale while sensitivity is discussed through a validation of the climatic outputs against visitation data for one of Mediterranean’s leading destinations, Antalya.

Projected Changes in Extreme Temperature and Precipitation Indices Over CORDEX-MENA Domain

“…To obtain more detailed climatic conditions over a specific region, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are considered to be the best tools for downscaling the outputs of CGCMs [47][48][49]. Here in this study, RegCM4.4 is used as an RCM with two different CGCMs, that are HadGEM2-ES and MPI-ESM-MR both of which are recommended to be used for MENA region together with RegCM4.4 [49][50][51]. According to Ozturk et al [50], RegCM outputs driven by MPI-ESM-MR show better agreement than the results of RegCM driven by HadGEM2-ES global model with respect to the observational dataset.…”

Assessing Present and Future Climate Conditions for Beach Tourism in Jardines del Rey (Cuba)

“…In the academic field of tourism climatology, the sun and beach segment of the tourism sector has been the subject of a large number of potentiality assessments due to its high dependence on weather conditions [22][23][24] and its leading role within the wide range of available tourism products worldwide. Many of the research papers that have assessed the potential of climates for sun and beach tourism have tried to measure or quantify it using climate tourism indexes such as the Tourism Climate Index [25][26][27][28][29], the Climate Index for Tourism [30], the Climate Tourism Information Scheme [31][32][33][34], the Beach Climate Index [35], the Beach Utility Index [36] and the Holiday Climate Index [37], among others. However, relatively few assessments have been made of the tourism potential of a particular climate using the weather types method, in spite of the fact that it is based on the true state of weather and more accurately reflects the nature of the atmospheric medium by rejecting both the exclusive use of one single climate element and the use of potentially misleading average values (instead using the daily figure, which is real and tangible for people) [23,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47].…”

The Coastal Tourism Climate Index (CTCI): Development, Validation, and Application for Chinese Coastal Cities

“…For example, the BCI encompasses five weighted sub-indices: thermal sensation, precipitation, sunshine, wind, and bathing water temperature. The HCI and OPT contain four weighted facets: thermal comfort, aesthetic, precipitation, and wind [44]. Moreover, these evaluation models all adopt weighted summation in form, but the methods for improving the objectivity of the index weight are still worth in-depth discussion.…”