Bert Van Schaeybroeck

Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium | KMI

High-quality climate information tailored to cities’ needs assists decision makers to prepare for and adapt to climate change impacts, as well as to support the targeted transition towards climate resilient cities. During the last decades, two main modelling approaches emerged to understand and analyse the urban climate and to generate information....

Dunkelflautes, events of low renewable production and potentially high demand, are the most extreme examples of the susceptibility of a renewable energy system with respect to weather variability. Yet, these events currently lack a precise definition in the literature. Based on 41 years of weather data, we explore the resilience of the Belgian ener...

ሓያል ኣምበጣ ግራትካ በሊዑስ ኣብ ደጎልካ ይሰፍር:: --------------- A locust swarm that ravaged your crops camps in your backyard. ------------Abstract: This study investigates the impact of the Tigray war on agricultural activities in the region during the 2021 cropping season. The conflict, beginning in late 2020 amidst a desert locust infestation, resulting in a...

Selecting climate model projections is a common practice for regional and local studies. This process often relies on local rather than synoptic variables. Even when synoptic weather types are considered, these are not related to the variable or climate impact driver of interest. Therefore, most selection procedures may not sufficiently account for...

This article presents an evaluation and sensitivity analysis of km‐scale simulations of an unprecedented extreme rainfall event over Europe, with a specific focus on sub‐hourly extremes, size distributions, and kinetic energy (KE) of rain. These variables are critical for hydrological applications, such as flood forecasting or soil‐loss monitoring,...

Selecting climate model projections is a common practice for regional and local studies. This process often relies on local rather than synoptic variables. Even when synoptic weather types are considered, these are not related to the variable or climate impact driver of interest. Therefore, most selection procedures may not sufficiently account for...

The establishment of wind-energy resources in Ethiopia has seen tremendous growth in the past few years. Ethiopia, however, features a complex topography rendering a detailed wind-resource assessment essential. This requires detailed modeling and a reliable observational dataset for validation. In this study, we compare the ability of a regional cl...

Topoclimate, orographically enhanced rain on windward slopes and leeward rain shadows, control rainfall variability in tropical mountains. Such variability may cause a substantial societal impact in populated highlands such as in Ethiopia. This study aims at understanding the rainfall diurnal cycle and the orographic driving factors over the Ethiop...

Wars have multifaceted effects on small-scale farming systems. Due to the paucity of field data, researchers take remotely sensed data as the best option to monitor and map changes in farming systems in relation to war. However, unless supported by ground data, such an approach hardly considers the diversity in local conditions as experienced by lo...

While the Ethiopian highlands constitute over 90% of the population and total area suitable for agriculture, livelihood of 66% of the population depends on subsistence rainfed agriculture. Small rainfall variability could therefore cause massive economic loss. This work aims at understanding the sub daily distribution of average and extreme summer...

During the 2021 conflict in Tigray (north Ethiopia) crop cultivation has been hampered by warfare. Oxen have been looted and killed, farm inputs and tools destroyed by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Farmers felt vulnerable out in the open with their oxen. To produce, farmers evaluated risks involved with ploughing and organised lookouts. Overall,...

Circulatory-system diseases (CSDs) are responsible for 50-60% of all deaths in Romania. Due to its continental climate, with cold winters and very warm summers, there is a strong temperature dependence of the CSD mortality. Additionally, within its capital Bucharest, the urban heat island (UHI) is expected to enhance (reduce) heat (cold)-related mo...

In July 2021 extreme rainfall across Western Europe caused severe flooding and substantial impacts, including over 200 fatalities and extensive infrastructure damage within Germany and the Benelux countries. After the event, a hydrological assessment and a probabilistic event attribution analysis of rainfall data were initiated and complemented by...

Statistical postprocessing of medium-range weather forecasts is an important component of modern forecasting systems. Since the beginning of modern data science, numerous new postprocessing methods have been proposed, complementing an already very diverse field. However, one of the questions that frequently arises when considering different methods...

Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) has strong relations with extreme rainfall and their increments in a future warming world are typically associated. It is, however, unclear how different climatic conditions and orographic effects modulate these changes in the equatorial region. We investigate PWV and heavy rainfall over Ethiopia using Regional Climat...

The Ethiopian highlands are home to more than 90% of the Ethiopian population and constitute for 90% of total area suitable for agriculture (Hurni et al., 2010). The livelihood of 66% of Ethiopia's population depends on subsistence agriculture, mostly rainfed. Little rainfall variability can therefore cause massive economic loss for farmers reliant...

Plain Language Summary Heavy precipitation is known to have major impacts on society, including crop damage, soil erosion, landslides, and increased flood risk. In recent years, there is a growing body of evidence that human‐induced climate change has intensified extreme precipitation on the global scale. Both regional and global climate models pre...

Estimating the impact of climate change and emission scenarios on air pollution can be done using regional climate models (RCMs). Climate uncertainties are commonly estimated using RCM ensembles such as provided by EURO-CORDEX. Despite the strong relations between the weather and air pollutants, interactions are usually complex and require meteorol...

Statistical Postprocessing of medium-range weather forecasts is an important component of modern forecasting systems. Since the beginning of modern data science, numerous new postprocessing methods have been proposed, complementing an already very diverse field. However, one of the questions that frequently arises when considering different methods...

Due to war conditions, the local farmers had to largely rely on their own crop production, mainly by subsistence farming, in Tigray, North Ethiopia. We assessed the crop stands in 2021 and evaluated the level of resilience of the indigenous farming system. Quantitative data were collected from 161 farm parcels in various ecoregions of this tropical...

Due to war conditions, the local farmers had to largely rely on their own crop production, mainly by subsistence farming, in Tigray, North Ethiopia. We assessed the crop stands in 2021 and evaluated the level of resilience of the indigenous farming system. Quantitative data were collected from 161 farm parcels in various ecoregions of this tropical...

There is an increasing need to obtain climate projections for cities using an ensemble approach for uncertainty estimation. Yet, current-day computational resources are too limited to dynamically downscale GCM ensembles to urban scale. Here, a recently developed and validated statistical-dynamical computationally-cheap method is employed to downsca...

Despite the wealth of existing climate forecast data, only a small part is effectively exploited for sectoral applications. A major cause of this is the lack of integrated tools that allow the translation of data into useful and skillful climate information. This barrier is addressed through the development of an R package. Climate Services Toolbox...

Background There is strong evidence of mortality being associated to extreme temperatures but the extent to which individual or residential factors modulate this temperature vulnerability is less clear. Methods We conducted a multi-city study with a time-stratified case-crossover design and used conditional logistic regression to examine the assoc...

In the context of the COVID-19 outbreak, a strict lockdown was ordered by Belgian authorities from 18/03/2020 till 04/05/2020. This led to a limitation of industrial production, human activities and transport use where only essential motorized transport were permitted. This research is an attempt to study the impact of these measures on the canopy...

Within Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) theory we derive the interface potential V(ℓ) which describes the interaction between the interface separating two demixed Bose-condensed gases and an optical hard wall at a distance ℓ. Previous work revealed that this interaction gives rise to extraordinary wetting and prewetting phenomena. Calculations that explore no...

In light of climate change, health risks are expected to be exacerbated by more frequent high temperatures and reduced by less frequent cold extremes. To assess the impact of different climate change scenarios, it is necessary to describe the current effects of temperature on health. A time-stratified case-crossover design fitted with conditional q...

Drought indices are used to identify and monitor drought events. The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) is a widely used index based on accumulated water balance. There is, however, no broad consensus on which probability distribution is the most appropriate for water balances. This issue is investigated for Ethiopia using 1...

Atmospheric water vapor plays a crucial role in atmospheric, climate change, meteorological, and hydrological processes. In a country like Ethiopia, with its complex topography and synoptic-scale spatiotemporal circulation patterns, the analysis of the spatiotemporal variability of precipitable water vapor (PWV) is very challenging, and is hampered...

Within Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) theory we derive the interface potential V (l) which describes the interaction between the interface separating two demixed Bose-condensed gases and an optical hard wall at a distance l. Previous work revealed that this interaction gives rise to extraordinary wetting and prewetting phenomena. Calculations that explore n...

Circulatory-system diseases (CSDs) are responsible for 50-60% of all deaths in Romania. Due to its continental climate, with cold winters and very warm summers, there is a strong temperature dependence of the CSD mortality. Additionally, within its capital Bucharest, the urban heat island is expected to enhance (reduce) heat (cold)-related mortalit...

Topoclimate, orographic rains on windward slopes and leeward rain shadow control the rainfall variability in tropical mountains (Van den Hende et al., 2021). Such rainfall variability has a substantial societal impact. For instance, they can cause differences in the wealth of rain-fed agriculture farmers among the windward and leeward sides of the...

In Africa, the IPCC projects a temperature increase of around 2.7 °C by 2050 (for the current emissions trajectory, RCP 8.5), and even more importantly, a substantial change in continental precipitation patterns. Climate change could have a considerable impact on snowfall and snowmelt and, even though these phenomena are not spontaneously associate...

Despite the wealth of existing climate forecast data, only a small part is effectively exploited for sectoral applications. A major cause of this is the lack of integrated tools that allow the translation of data into useful and skilful climate information. This barrier is addressed through the development of an R package. CSTools is an easy-to-use...

The demand from the city planners and stakeholders concerning climate change impact on cities is increasing. Due to the global warming, cities, which are already more vulnerable, will experience an increasing number of extreme events such as heat waves. However, the information about long-term climate projections are extracted from global or region...

The European drought of 1921 is assessed in terms of its impacts on society and in terms of its physical characteristics. The development of impacts of the drought are categorized by a systematic survey of newspaper reports from five European newspapers covering the area from England to the Czech Republic and other parts of Europe. This is coupled...

Climate change leads to more days with extremely hot temperatures. Previous analyses of heat waves have documented a short-term rise in mortality. The results on the relationship between high temperatures and hospitalisations, especially in vulnerable patients admitted to nursing homes, are inconsistent. The objective of this research was to examin...

This study aimed to simulate oak and beech forest growth under various scenarios of climate change and to evaluate how the forest response depends on site properties and particularly on stand characteristics using the individual process-based model HETEROFOR. First, this model was evaluated on a wide range of site conditions. We used data from 36 l...

Ethiopia is a mountainous country known for its distinct topography ranging from alpine environment to desert-like conditions along the rift valley. Topoclimate, orographic rains on windward slopes and leeward rain shadow control rainfall variability in tropical mountains (Van den Hende et al., 2021). Such variability has a substantial societal imp...

Collecting field data on 161 sampling sites in very difficult conditions has allowed us to evaluate the status of cropping in part of the Tigray region of Ethiopia, by the end of August 2021. We have observed that local farming communities are remarkably resilient, also in times of conflict and instability. Relying on indigenous knowledge and local...

Sub-daily precipitation extremes are high-impact events that can result in flash floods, sewer system overload, or landslides. Several studies have reported an intensification of projected short-duration extreme rainfall in a warmer future climate. Traditionally, regional climate models (RCMs) are run at a coarse resolution using deep-convection pa...

This Deliverable (5.3) builds on the current climate simulations of D5.2 in which approaches and results were presented for current (recent) climate and current city for selected regions and phenomena. In this Deliverable the results for future climate and – if feasible – for the future city are first presented based on the same models and approach...

Since November 2020, a civil war is taking place in Tigray (north Ethiopia), where about 75% of the active population are farmers. Here, we present the state of ploughing in Tigray’s war conditions, early in the 2021 rainy season and discuss contextual factors. Early May 2021, around Mekelle, very few croplands have been ploughed, as compared to th...

The European drought of 1921 is assessed in terms of its impacts on society and in terms of its physical characteristics. The development of impacts of the drought are categorized by a systematic survey of newspaper reports from five European newspapers covering the area from England to the Czech Republic and other parts of Europe. This is coupled...

Today, the vast majority of meteorological data are collected in open, rural environments to comply with the standards set by the World Meteorological Organization. However, these traditional networks lack local information that would be of immense value, for example, for studying urban microclimate, evaluating climate adaptation measures, or impro...

El Niño influences the global climate through teleconnections that are not constant in space and time. In order to study and visualize the spatiotemporal patterns of the El Niño teleconnections, a new method inspired by the concept of attribute trajectories is proposed. The coordinates of the trajectories are the normalized anomalies of the relevan...

To allow for climate impact studies on human and natural systems, high-resolution climate information is needed. Over some parts of the world plenty of regional climate simulations have been carried out, while in other regions hardly any high-resolution climate information is available. The CORDEX Central Asia domain is one of these regions, and th...

Orography is known to affect local meteorological conditions by inducing orographic rainfall and a rain shadow i.e. reduced rainfall on the mountain’s leeside with respect to the windward side. Therefore it has a strong effect on the local population and agriculture. Recent work highlights the ambiguities in the definition and difficulties in quant...

The new system for post-processing ECMWF ensemble forecasts at the stations of the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) of Belgium was described previously in a short newsletter article (Vannitsem & Demaeyer, 2020). This system has now been operational since the summer of 2020 and we provide a description of its functionality and a preliminary anal...

As an effect of climate change, cities need detailed information on urban climates at decision scale that cannot be easily delivered using current observation networks, nor global and even regional climate models. A review is presented of the recent literature and recommendations are formulated for future work. In most cities, historical observatio...

Statistical postprocessing techniques are nowadays key components of the forecasting suites in many national meteorological services (NMS), with, for most of them, the objective of correcting the impact of different types of errors on the forecasts. The final aim is to provide optimal, automated, seamless forecasts for end users. Many techniques ar...

Key message The change in forest productivity was simulated in six stands in Wallonia (Belgium) following different climate scenarios using a process-based and spatially explicit tree growth model. Simulations revealed a strong and positive impact of the CO 2 fertilization while the negative effect of the transpiration deficit was compensated by lo...

Wheat yield variability will increase in the future due to the projected increase in extreme weather events and long-term climate change effects. Currently, regional agricultural statistics are used to monitor wheat yield. Remotely sensed vegetation indices have a higher spatio-temporal resolution and could give more insight into crop yield. In thi...

Background Summer temperatures are expected to increase and heat waves will occur more frequently, be longer, and be more intense as a result of global warming. A growing body of evidence indicates that increasing temperature and heatwaves are associated with excess mortality and therefore global heating may become a major public health threat. How...

In many cities across Europe, both urban authorities and private actors have made strong commitments to adapt to future climate changes. Although a lot of climate information is available at the global and regional scale, this is often not the case at the local urban scale. Moreover, such information should account for a wide range of uncertainty f...

The demand of city planners for quantitative information on the impact of climate change on the urban environment is increasing. However, such information is usually extracted from decade-long climate projections generated with global or regional climate models (GCM or RCM). Due to their coarse resolution and unsuitable physical parametrization, ho...

Statistical postprocessing techniques are nowadays key components of the forecasting suites in many National Meteorological Services (NMS), with for most of them, the objective of correcting the impact of different types of errors on the forecasts. The final aim is to provide optimal, automated, seamless forecasts for end users. Many techniques are...

Abstract. To allow for climate impact studies on human and natural systems high-resolution climate information is needed. Over some parts of the world plenty of regional climate simulations have been carried out, while in other regions hardly any high-resolution climate information is available. This publication aims at addressing one of these regi...

Convection-permitting models (CPMs) have been proven successful in simulating extreme precipitation statistics. However, when such models are used to study climate change, contrasting sensitivities with respect to resolution (CPM vs. models with parameterized convection) are found for different parts of the world. In this study, we explore to which...

Over the last decade, near real-time analysis of GPS data has become a well-established atmospheric observing tool, primarily coordinated by the EIG EUMETNET GPS Water Vapour Programme (E-GVAP) in Europe. In the near future, four operational GNSS will be available for commercial and scientific applications with atmospheric science benefiting from n...

Prompted with the ongoing and projected climate change, a wide range of cities have committed, not only to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions but also to implement different climate change adaptation measures. These measures serve to ensure the wellbeing of the urban population. In practice, however , the planning of realistic adaptation measures is...