Long‐term precipitation trend analysis in Europe and in the Mediterranean basin

Abstract

The spatiotemporal analysis of a region's precipitation climate regime could be particularly interesting for many fields of applied sciences, such as climatology, hydrology and water resources management. In this study, the precipitation trends at seasonal and annual scale, over a large area of the northern Hemisphere have been analysed based on a globally gridded precipitation data sets of monthly observations. In particular, among the several data sets available in literature, with spatial resolutions of 0.5° longitude/latitude, in this work the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre Full Data Reanalysis Version 6 data set has been used. The broad extension of the area under investigation allowed a better understanding of trend precipitation patterns over space. In fact, yearly results evidenced a marked negative rainfall tendency in the eastern Mediterranean (more than −20 mm/10 years) and in North Africa (until −16 mm/10 years), while a relatively large positive trend (more than 20 mm/10 years) in central and northern Europe has been observed.

Changes in precipitation over the East Herzegovina region

“…Significant negative trends in annual precipitation were found over the majority of Mediterranean areas, with an exception of northern Africa, southern Italy and western Iberian Peninsula, where slight positive trends appeared (Philandras et al, 2011). During the second half of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, a decrease in annual precipitation has predominated in the vast majority of areas across the Mediterranean region (Philandras et al, 2011;Kelley et al, 2012;López-Moreno et al, 2010;De Luis et al, 2009;Caloiero et al, 2018;Hatzianastassiou et al, 2008). Particularly prominent was a change in wintertime precipitation towards drier conditions, which has occurred since the beginning of the 20th century (Hoerling et al, 2012).…”

Spatial distribution and trends of different precipitation variability indices based on daily data in Northern Chile between 1966 and 2015

“…From a climatic point of view, it is well known that monthly amounts provide valuable information regarding the precipitation of a given territory. Traditionally, the focus has been placed on means and the extreme rainfall of concrete regions around the world at global (Berghuijs et al, ) and regional scales: the Mediterranean (Caloiero et al, ; Lazoglou et al, ; Zittis, ), the rest of Europe (Panagos et al, ; Beranová and Kyselý, ; Brown, ), Africa (Abahous et al, ; Gummadi et al, ), Asia (Jiang et al, ; Kim et al, ; Ullah et al, ; Zhao et al, ), and America (Bernardino et al, ; Ciemer et al, ; Valdés‐Pineda et al, ).…”

Drought Analysis in Europe and in the Mediterranean Basin Using the Standardized Precipitation Index

“…The database contains monthly precipitation data at 0.5 • resolution (excluding Antarctica) starting from the beginning of the past century; however, due to the low number of rain gauges used for the creation of the gridded database, in this work data before 1950s were not considered. Several papers thoroughly used and explained the GPCC data set [60][61][62].…”