J. P. Montávez

• PhD
• Professor at University of Murcia

This study presents an innovative approach to forecasting seasonal anomalies in burned areas (BA) by integrating process-based seasonal prediction and a random forest climate-fire model. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), derived from observed precipitation, allows us to predict burned area anomalies a month before the start of the target...

The primary goal of this study is to introduce the initial phase of developing an impact-based forecasting system for extreme heatwaves, utilizing a novel multivariate index which, at this early stage, already employs a combination of a statistical approach and physical principles related to human body water loss. This system also incorporates a mi...

This study examines a scenario combining a prolonged solar minimum, like the historical Maunder Minimum, with the increased CO2 emissions characteristic of the post-industrial era. Two scenarios were developed in NCAR/CESM 2.0 implemented at LAMMOC/UFF to create simulations from 1850 to 2000, it contrasts differing radiative forcings from 1950 onwa...

In the modern world, electric energy plays a pivotal role in sustaining life and driving technological, scientific, and human development. Consequently, the selection and availability of the energy sources used for electricity generation have become crucial elements of strategic planning for countries and economic blocks. Moreover, the impact of th...

This study analyzed the sensitivity of atmospheric rivers (ARs) to aerosol treatment in regional climate simulations. Three experiments covering the Iberian Peninsula for the period from 1991 to 2010 were examined: (1) an experiment including prescribed aerosols (BASE); (2) an experiment including direct and semi-direct aerosol effects (ARI); and (...

This study investigates a hypothetical scenario in which a prolonged solar minimum, such as the Maunder minimum, is combined with an increase in CO2 emissions observed during the postindustrial period. For that purpose, two fully coupled state-of-the-art Earth system simulations were performed spanning the period 1850–2000. From the year 1950 onwar...

This study investigates a hypothetical scenario in which a prolonged solar minimum, such as the Maunder Minimum, is combined with the increase in CO2 emissions observed in the postindustrial period. For that, two fully-coupled state-of-the-art Earth system simulations were performed spanning the period 1850-2000. From the year 1950 onward, they dif...

In the modern world, electric energy plays a pivotal role in sustaining life and driving technological, scientific, and human development. Consequently, the selection and availability of the energy sources used for electricity generation have become crucial elements of strategic planning for countries and economic blocks. Moreover, the impact of th...

This study analyzed the sensitivity of Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) to aerosol treatment in regional climate simulations. Three experiments covering the Iberian Peninsula for the period 1991 to 2010 were examined, each including prescribed aerosols (BASE), direct and semi-direct aerosol effects (ARI), and direct, semi-direct, and indirect aerosol effec...

Aerosols can strongly influence atmospheric circulation, and categorizing it into circulation types (CTs) helps in understanding the relationship between atmospheric forcing and surface conditions. However, few studies have considered the impact of interactive aerosols on atmospheric dynamics from a climatic perspective. This contribution aims to a...

Aerosol concentration, size and composition are fundamental in hydrometeor formation processes. Meteorological models often use prescribed aerosol concentrations and a single substance. In this study, we analyze the role of aerosol concentration, acting both as CCN and IN, in the development of precipitation in a mixed phase system in numerical wea...

Drought remains a costly natural disaster, with strong socio-economic and environmental impacts. Skilful seasonal drought forecasts can help to make early decisions. Here we assess the quality of a prototype seasonal forecasting system for a Mediterranean region (peninsular Spain + Balearic Islands) to predict meteorological drought as measured by...

Although the literature still debates how several anthropogenic and natural factors have contributed to the recent streamflow decline in the Iberian Peninsula, a continuing decrease in winter precipitation (WP) has been noticed in this area since the 1980s and has been associated with large-scale atmospheric drivers. This contribution assesses the...

This study presents a new dynamical downscaling strategy for extreme events. It is based on a combination of statistical downscaling of coarsely resolved global model simulations and dynamical downscaling of specific extreme events constrained by the statistical downscaling part. The method is applied to precipitation extremes over the upper Aare c...

The present study aims at disentangling the role of marine aerosols in extreme precipitation events of orographic nature over near-maritime locations. Being the hazardous character of these events mainly associated to runoffs and river floodings, their destructive potential makes them subjects of special interest. In pursuit of a deep understanding...

A significant abrupt decrease of Winter Precipitation (WP) has been noticed in the Iberian Peninsula since the 1980s related to atmospheric drivers. This contribution assesses the long-term variability of water resources based on a multivariate-driven approach. For this purpose, the novel dataset of Near Natural Water Inflows to Reservoirs of Spain...

Medicanes are mesoscale tropical-like cyclones that develop in the Mediterranean basin and represent a great hazard for the coastal population. The skill to accurately simulate them is of utmost importance to prevent economical and personal damage. Medicanes are fueled by the latent heat released in the condensation process associated with convecti...

High-resolution climate model simulations for the last millennium were used to elucidate the main winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric pattern during enhanced Eastern Mediterranean Transient (EMT-type) events, a situation in which an additional overturning cell is detected in the Mediterranean at the Aegean Sea. The differential upward heat flux...

Vegetation plays a key role in partitioning energy at the surface. Meteorological and Climate Models, both global and regional, implement vegetation using two parameters, the vegetation fraction and the leaf area index, obtained from satellite data. In most cases, models use average values for a given period. However, the vegetation is subject to s...

High resolution climate model simulations for the last millennium were used to elucidate the main winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric pattern during enhanced Eastern Mediterranean Transient (EMT-type) events, a situation in which an additional overturning cell is detected in the Mediterranean at the Aegean Sea. The differential upward heat flux...

The amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface can be highly determined by atmospheric aerosols, which have been pointed to as the most uncertain climate forcing agents through their direct (scattering and absorption), semi-direct (absorption implying a thermodynamic effect on clouds) and indirect (modification of cloud properties when...

Medicanes are mesoscale tropical-like cyclones that develop in the Mediterranean basin and represent a great hazard for the coastal population. The skill to accurately simulate them is of utmost importance to prevent economical and personal damages. Medicanes are fuelled by the latent heat released in the condensation process associated to convecti...

The Mediterranean basin was identified decades ago as a potential hotspot region under global warming, where droughts and floods keep increasing. However, uncertainties about how the water cycle is being affected by the climate change still remain. Henceforth, this study analyses the recent variability of winter precipitation (WP) in Andalusia, the...

The effect of aerosols on regional climate simulations presents large uncertainties due to their complex and non-linear interactions with a wide variety of factors, including aerosol–radiation (ARI) and aerosol–cloud (ACI) interactions. These interactions are strongly conditioned by the meteorological situation and type of aerosol, but, despite the...

This work aims at presenting TITAM, a time-independent tracking algorithm specifically suited for medicanes. In the last decades, the study of medicanes has been repeatedly addressed given their potential to damage coastal zones. Their hazardous associated meteorological conditions have converted them to a major threat. Even though medicane similar...

The solar resource can be highly influenced by clouds and atmospheric aerosol, which has been named by the IPCC as the most uncertainty climate forcing agent. Nonetheless, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) hardly ever model dynamically atmospheric aerosol concentration and their interaction with radiation and clouds, in contrast to Global Circulation...

This work aims at presenting TITAM, a time independent tracking algorithm specifically suited for medicanes. In the last decades, the study of medicanes has been repeatedly addressed given their potential to damage coastal zones. Their hazardous associated meteorological conditions have converted them in a major threat. Even though their similariti...

Abstract. The effect of aerosols on regional climate simulations presents large uncertainties due to their complex and non-linear interactions with a wide variety of factors, including aerosol-radiation (ARI) and aerosol-cloud (ACI) interactions. These interactions are strongly conditioned by the meteorological situation and the type of aerosol. De...

The European CORDEX (EURO-CORDEX) initiative is a large voluntary effort that seeks to advance regional climate and Earth system science in Europe. As part of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) - Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), it shares the broader goals of providing a model evaluation and climate projection framewor...

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) represent one of the most important sources of uncertainties in climate modelling. In this sense, realistic simulations of ACI are needed for a better understanding of the complex interactions between air pollution and the climate system. This work quantifies the added value of including ACI in an online coupled cli...

Regional climate models (RCMs) are usually initialized and driven through the boundaries of their limited area domain by data provided by global models (GCMs). The mismatch between the low‐resolution GCM initial conditions and RCM's high resolution introduces physical inconsistencies between the various components of the RCM. These inconsistencies...

Long filaments of high integrated water vapor transport (IVT) content, widely known as atmospheric rivers (ARs), play a relevant role in the water cycle being also associated to many extreme flooding events worldwide. In this work we inspect whether similar structures can be found over the western Mediterranean. The methodology used here to detect...

The Mediterranean Basin is frequently affected by desert dust outbreaks coming from the north of Africa. The presence of this type of particulate matter (PM) joint to others (in particular, anthropogenic pollution from the intense human activities) makes the air quality over this region a worrying issue. In this sense, an accurate characterization...

Historical climatology has remarkable potentialities to produce climatic reconstructions with high temporal resolution. However, some methodological limitations hinder the spatial development of this discipline. This study presents a new approach to historical climatology that overcomes some of the limitations of classical approaches, such as the r...

The representation of vegetation in land surface models (LSM) is crucial for modeling atmospheric processes in regional climate models (RCMs). Vegetation is characterized by the green fractional vegetation cover (FVC) and/or the leaf area index (LAI) that are obtained from nearest difference vegetation index (NDVI) data. Most regional climate model...

The main disadvantage of wind energy is its high spatial and temporal variability. This paper presents a web mapping tool to communicate to private users both the available wind resource and information to evaluate the suitability of several types of turbine for any point on the Iberian Peninsula. This tool performs on-the-fly three-dimensional int...

Here we present the first assessment of climate change impacts on the temporal variability of the joint production of wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) power across Europe. For that we adopted regional and continental perspectives (assuming a single European electricity grid), considered several temporal frequencies (from daily to annual), used stat...

The historical climatology has remarkable potentialities to produce climatic reconstructions with high temporal resolution. However, there are methodological limitations that hinder the spatial development of this discipline. This study presents a new approach to Historical Climatology that overcomes some of the limitations of classical approaches...

We present an unprecedented ensemble of 196 future climate projections arising from different global and regional model intercomparison projects (MIPs): CMIP3, CMIP5, ENSEMBLES, ESCENA, EURO- and Med-CORDEX. This multi-MIP ensemble includes all regional climate model (RCM) projections publicly available to date, along with their driving global clim...

Dust is a natural aerosol with an important influence over the Mediterranean basin from a climatic perspective. WRF-Chem simulations have been evaluated over Europe for an October 2010 dust episode. Three modeling scenarios differ in the inclusion or not of aerosol-radiation-cloud interactions.The evaluation of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) indic...

Climate change will bring increases in temperatures and extreme events (e.g. heatwaves), which impacts human health. Heatwaves have a high impact on society, both from a health and an economical perspective, leading to increases on heat stroke hospital admission and mortality. For this reason, heatwaves have to be taken into account for dwellers we...

The observed trend towards warmer and drier conditions in southern Europe is projected to continue in the next decades, possibly leading to increased risk of large fires. However, an assessment of climate change impacts on fires at and above the 1.5 °C Paris target is still missing. Here, we estimate future summer burned area in Mediterranean Europ...

Regional climate modelling is used to simulate the hydrological cycle, which is fundamental for climate impact investigations. However, the output of these models is affected by biases that hamper its direct use in impact modelling. Here, we present two high-resolution (2 km) climate simulations of precipitation in the Alpine region, evaluate their...

Atmospheric aerosols modify the radiative budget of the Earth due to their optical, microphysical and chemical properties, and are considered one of the most uncertain climate forcing agents. In order to characterise the uncertainties associated with satellite and modelling approaches to represent aerosol optical properties, mainly aerosol optical...

Air pollution impacts human health, by the close relationship with climate change and because of the effects that pollution has on human health and welfare. Air pollution impacts health in a form that it also involves some associated external costs to society. This study is focused on particulate matter, especially fine particles (with a diameter o...

Variations in the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) may not be included as external forcing when running regional climate models (RCMs); at least, this is a non-regulated, non-documented practice. Here we investigate the so far unexplored impact of considering the rising evolution of the CO2, CH4, and N2O atmospheric concentratio...

Summary Air pollution impacts human health, by the close relationship with climate change and because of the effects that pollution has on human health and welfare. This study tries to assess the impacts of present (1996-2015) and future (2071-2100) air pollution by fine particles on several pathologies and to estimate the difference in the costs a...

The Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) provides a framework for the collation of a set of consistent, multi-sector, multi-scale climate-impact simulations, based on scientifically and politically-relevant historical and future scenarios. This framework serves as a basis for robust projections of climate impacts, as well as...

Regional climate modelling is used to better capture the hydrological cycle, which is fundamental for climate impact investigations. However, the output of these models is affected by biases that hamper its direct use in impact modelling. Here, we present and evaluate the performance of two high-resolution (2 km) climate simulations of precipitatio...

http://www.clivar.org/documents/exchanges-73

This paper elucidates the impact of biomass burning aerosols (BB) on surface winds for the Russian fires episode during 25 July to 15 August 2010. The methodology consists of three WRF-Chem simulations over Europe differing in the inclusion (or not) of aerosol-radiation and aerosol-cloud interactions. The presence of BB reduces the 10-m wind speed...

This study assesses the impact of the atmospheric stability on the turbulent orographic form drag (TOFD) generated by unresolved small-scale orography (SSO) focusing on surface winds. With this aim, several experiments are conducted with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and they are evaluated over a large number of stations (318 at...

Floods are the natural hazard that generates greater impacts in the area. One of the factors that facilitate the lack of strategic planning is the absence of a correct chronology of flood episodes. In this situation, land use plans, are based on inadequate chronologies that do not report the real risk of the population of this area. To reduce this...

Ambitious climate change mitigation plans call for a significant increase in the use of renewables, which could, however, make the supply system more vulnerable to climate variability and changes. Here we evaluate climate change impacts on solar photovoltaic (PV) power in Europe using the recent EURO-CORDEX ensemble of high-resolution climate proje...

Supplementary Figures 1-11, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary References

This paper proposes a method that allows the detection of trends in the frequency of extreme events and its attribution to changes in atmospheric dynamics characterized through Circulation Types (CTs). The method is applied to summer Extremely Hot Days (EHD) in Spain during the period 1958–2008. For carrying out this exercise, regional series of da...

Wind energy is susceptible to global climate change because it could alter the wind patterns. Then, improvement of our knowledge of wind field variability is crucial to optimize the use of wind resources in a given region. Here, we quantify the effects of climate change on the surface wind speed field over the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Island...

This study compares gridded European seasonal series of surface air temperature (SAT) and precipitation (PRE) reconstructions with a regional climate simulation over the period 1500–1990. The area is analysed separately for nine subareas that represent the majority of the climate diversity in the European sector. In their spatial structure, an over...

Para comprender el clima del futuro debemos antes estudiar y comprender el del pasado. Esa es la misión de la ciencia paleoclimática. Utilizando modelos de simulación paleoclimática regionales nos hemos centrado en estudiar el parámetro del viento simulado en la Península Ibérica durante prácticamente todo el último milenio (1002-1989) para hallar...

The use of hindcast climatic data is quite extended for multiple applications. However, this approach needs the support of a validation process to allow its drawbacks and, therefore, confidence levels to be assessed. In this work, the strategy relies on an hourly wind database resulting from a dynamical downscaling experiment, with a spatial resolu...

This work presents a characterization of the surface wind climatology over the Iberian Peninsula (IP). For this objective, an unprecedented observational database has been developed. The database covers a period of 6 years (2002–2007) and consists of hourly wind speed and wind direction data recorded at 514 automatic weather stations. The original...

In this paper we present a methodology for obtaining a energy production system based on renewable energy able to generate the energy demand supported by hydro electric pumped storage. This model is based on the minimization of the variance of the differences between energy demand and production. The minimization procedure uses the simulated anneal...

This work conducts a multi-physics ensemble of air quality projections in order to elucidate the spreads and uncertainties behind the election of the physical parameterizations in the regional climate models. Results indicate that the studied parameterized processes and air pollutants transport and dispersion are closely tied together, and hence th...

This study addresses the task of identifying optimum locations for solar and wind power plants so that the wind-plus- solar power generation meets certain conditions of efficiency and stability, thus allowing to overcome the downside that the natural variability of these renewable resources represents. The method was based on a simulated annealing...

In the frame of the Spanish project ESCENA, 5 regional climate model simulations were analyzed in terms of their representation of precipitation and temperature extremes over Spain. The climate complexity of the target domain poses a challenge for the models in terms of their ability to simulate precipitation and temperature extremes. There are imp...

Climate change alone influences future levels of tropospheric ozone and their precursors through modifications of gas-phase chemistry, transport, removal, and natural emissions. The goal of this study is to determine at what extent the modes of variability of gas-phase pollutants respond to different climate change scenarios over Europe. The method...

[1] Due to the computational time required for modeling air quality climatologies, the characterization of processes introducing the largest uncertainty in air quality-climate projections is a sound field of research. Here an air quality ensemble is assessed over Europe for present (1971–2000) and future (2071–2100, SRES A2) periods to characterize...

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) controls a large amount of the European climate variability with asymmetric impacts in both time and space. Here we investigate how the NAO impact on the local atmospheric processes (disregarding the NAO impact on the large inter-continental transport mechanisms) influences the levels of various aerosol species...

The ESCENA (2008 to 2012) project is a Spanish initiative, which applies the dynamical downscaling technique to generate climate change scenarios based on an ensemble of Regional Climate Models (RCMs) consisting of PROMES, WRF, MM5 or REMO over Peninsular Spain and the Balearic and Canary Islands using a high resolution of 25 km. We describe the me...

Europe is investing considerably in renewable energies for a sustainable future, with both Iberian countries (Portugal and Spain) promoting significantly new hydropower, wind, and solar plants. The climate variability in this area is highly controlled by just a few large-scale teleconnection modes. However, the relationship between these modes and...

The performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to reproduce the surface wind circulations over complex terrain is examined. The atmospheric evolution is simulated using two versions of the WRF model during an over 13 year period (1992 to 2005) over a complex terrain region located in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula. A hi...