Climate change is a global problem, therefore most of the analyses are focused on averaged data that cover all the globe. Although these studies give a global picture of the observed changes, there is an increase request of studies at regional scale to understand the differences between what observed locally and what reported at global scale. Moreover, the analysis of the climate trends at regional scale can be important to develop a climate plan tuned with local characteristics and issues.
The Abruzzo region is in central Italy with an area of 10794 km² and includes high mountains, big valleys, hills and the sea side on the Adriatic coast. Since the beginning of the twentieth century temperature and precipitation have been recorded in several sites to cover geographically all the Abruzzo region by the National Hydrographic Service.
Here we report the analysis of about 100 years of observations to understand the regional climate trends in an area with a very heterogeneous orography. In our analysis, we used the monthly mean minimum and maximum temperature. The temperature time series of about twenty stations in Abruzzo region have been homogenized by the HOMER software (European COST Action ES0601; Mestre et al., 2013): different trends of the temperature as function of the time will be showed, depending on the average period analysed. These trends will be compared with those observed on global scale and on the north hemisphere. We will show the difference between the maximum and the minimum temperature trends in the last century, analysing also the seasonal tendency. The regional trends reflect the well know global tendency showing an increase in the temperature values in the last centuries (IPCC Fifth report, AR5). The Mediterranean Sea surface temperature (SST) is warming by 0.35 C per decade and it is significantly affected by atmospheric temperature (R = 98%) (Shaltout et al.,2014) with effect on meteorological events such as the formation and intensification of tornadic supercell over the Mediterranean: tornado intensification, as suggested by Miglietti et al. (2017), is facilitated by a warm SST anomaly. In our analysis, the links between climate trends and some economic indicators such as the tourism activities will be illustrated.
References
IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 151 pp.
Mestre O, Domonkos P, Picard F, Auer I, Robin S, Lebarbier E, Bohm R, Aguilar E, Guijarro J, Vertachnik G, Klancar M, Dubuisson B, Stepanek P. 2013. HOMER: a homogenization software – methods and applications. Idojaras, Quart. J. Hungarian Meteorol. Ser. 117(1): 47–67.
Miglietta Mario Marcello, Jordi Mazon, Vincenzo Motola and Antonello Pasini, Effect of a positive Sea Surface Temperature anomaly on a Mediterranean tornadic supercell, Scientific Reports volume 7, doi:10.1038/s41598-017-13170-0, 2017.
Shaltout, M. & Omstedt, A. Recent sea surface temperature trends and future scenarios for the Mediterranean Sea. Oceanologia 56, 411–443 (2014).
4a. Predictions and responses
