The Exceptional Iberian Heatwave of Summer 2018

A Special Report, entitled "Explaining Extreme Events in 2018 from a Climate Perspective", was recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, including a work on extreme events recorded in the summer of 2018 in the Iberian Peninsula. The researchers of Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL) Pedro Sousa, Ricardo Trigo, and Alexandre Ramos participated in this work in collaboration with researchers from the Instituto de Geosciencias of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Legend of the figure: (a) Z500 (m; contours) and TX anomaly (°C; shading) for 1–7 Aug 2018. Dots denote TX exceedance over previous records for that calendar period; (b) Flow-conditioned distributions of Iberian TX anomaly (°C; wrt 1981–2010; right y axis) for 1–7 Aug 2018 in past (1950–83; blue) and present (1984–2017; red) climates. Gray boxplots show their RMSD (left y axis); (c) Frequency series of good flow analogs (percentage of days) from raw (black) and detrended (gray) Z500 data. Dashed line indicates statistically significant trend (p < 0.05); (d) Past (blue) and present (red) flow-conditioned probabilities (%; left y axis) of Iberian TX anomaly above given thresholds (°C; x axis). The gray line represents the estimated FAR (dimensionless; right y axis) and the green line indicates the contribution of dynamical changes. Shading shows the 5th–95th percentile range from 1,000 random subsamples.

Know more about this work here.