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105
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Introduction
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October 2019 - present
November 2018 - October 2019
March 2017 - November 2018
Publications
Publications (105)
We analyse the observed climate-driven changes in summer wildfires and their future evolution in a typical Mediterranean environment (NE Spain). By analysing observed climate and fire data from 1970 to 2007, we estimate the response of fire number (NF) and burned area (BA) to climate trends, disentangling the drivers responsible for long-term and i...
Forest fires are a serious environmental hazard in southern Europe. Quantitative assessment of recent trends in fire statistics is important for assessing the possible shifts induced by climate and other environmental/socioeconomic changes in this area. Here we analyse recent fire trends in Portugal, Spain, southern France, Italy and Greece, buildi...
Summer fires frequently rage across Mediterranean Europe, often intensified by high temperatures and droughts. According to the state-of-the-art regional fire risk projections, in forthcoming decades climate effects are expected to become stronger and possibly overcome fire prevention efforts. However, significant uncertainties exist and the direct...
Societal exposure to large fires has been increasing in recent years. Estimating the expected fire activity a few months in advance would allow reducing environmental and socio-economic impacts through short-term adaptation and response to climate variability and change. However, seasonal prediction of climate-driven fires is still in its infancy....
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...
We assembled the first gridded burned area (BA) database of national wildfire data (ONFIRE), a comprehensive and integrated resource for researchers, non-government organisations, and government agencies analysing wildfires in various regions of the Earth. We extracted and harmonised records from different regions and sources using open and reprodu...
Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV) modulates El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) dynamics. Here, we explore the effect of warm (AMV+) and cold (AMV-) AMV conditions on the austral summer teleconnection of ENSO to Australia using idealized simulations performed with the NCAR-CESM1 model. AMV+ strengthens the mean and extreme precipitation and t...
Record-breaking summer forest fires have become a regular occurrence in California. Observations indicate a fivefold increase in summer burned area (BA) in forests in northern and central California during 1996 to 2021 relative to 1971 to 1995. While the higher temperature and increased dryness have been suggested to be the leading causes of increa...
Solar and wind power are called to play a main role in the transition toward decarbonized electricity systems. However, their integration in the energy mix is highly compromised due to the intermittency of their production caused by weather and climate variability. To face the challenge, here we present research about actionable strategies for wind...
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...
During the summer season, the Italian territory is vulnerable to extended wildfires, which can have dramatic impact on human activities and ecosystems. Such wildfire events are usually associated with the presence of drought conditions and are generally more severe in southern Italy, owing to the high temperatures and reduced precipitation that cha...
Biomass burning is one of the most critical factors impacting vegetation and atmospheric trends, with important societal implications, particularly when extreme weather conditions occur. Trends and factors of burned area (BA) have been analysed at regional and global scales, but little effort has been dedicated to study the interannual variability....
Marine ecosystems:
Despite covering only 0.82% of the ocean’s surface, the Mediterranean Sea supports up to 18% of all known marine species, with 21% being listed as vulnerable and 11% as endangered. The accelerated spread of tropical non-indigenous species is leading to the “tropicalization” of Mediterranean fauna and flora as a result of warming...
In October 2017, hundreds of wildfires ravaged the forests of the north and centre of Portugal. The fires were fanned by strong winds as tropical storm Ophelia swept the Iberian coast, dragging up smoke (together with Saharan dust from north-western Africa) into higher western European latitudes. Here we analyse the long-range transport of particul...
Droughts can have strong environmental and socioeconomic impacts in the Mediterranean region, in particular for countries relying on rain-fed agricultural production, but also in areas in which irrigation plays an important role and in which natural vegetation has been modified or is subject to water stress. The purpose of this review is to provide...
We present a long-term assessment of precipitation trends in Southwestern Europe (1850–2018) using data from multiple sources, including observations, gridded datasets and global climate model experiments. Contrary to previous investigations based on shorter records, we demonstrate, using new long-term, quality controlled precipitation series, the...
We analyzed long‐term variability and trends in meteorological droughts across Western Europe using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Precipitation data from 199 stations spanning the period 1851‐2018 were employed, following homogenisation, to derive SPI‐3 and SPI‐12 series for each station, together with indices on drought duration and...
Accurate and timely drought information is essential to move from postcrisis to preimpact drought-risk management. A number of drought datasets are already available. They cover the last three decades and provide data in near–real time (using different sources), but they are all “deterministic” (i.e., single realization), and input and output data...
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...
Wheat is the main staple crop and an important commodity in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. These are among the few areas in the world where the climate is suitable for growing durum wheat but also are among the most rapidly warming ones, according to the available scenarios of climate projections. How much food security and market stability...
Flooding is one of the main natural hazards in the world and causes huge economic and human impacts. Assessing the flood damage in the Mediterranean region is of great importance, especially because of its large vulnerability to climate change. Most past floods affecting the region were caused by intense precipitation events; thus the analysis of t...
A record 500,000 hectares burned in Portugal during the extreme wildfire season of 2017, with more than 120 human lives lost. Here we analyse the climatic factors responsible for the burned area (BA) from June to October series in Portugal for the period 1980-2017. Superposed onto a substantially stationary trend on BA data, strong oscillations on...
Flooding is one of the main natural hazard in the world and causes huge economic and human impacts. Assessing the flood damage in the Mediterranean region is of great importance, especially because its large vulnerability to climate change. Most past floods affecting the region were caused by intense precipitation events, thus the analysis of the l...
Quantitative estimate of observational uncertainty is an essential ingredient to correctly interpret changes in climatic and environmental variables such as wildfires. In this work we compare four state-of-the-art satellite fire products with the gridded, ground-based EFFIS dataset for Mediterranean Europe and analyse their statistical differences....
In this paper, we assess and develop a climate service focused on the production of seasonal predictions for summer wildfires in a Mediterranean region through a participatory approach with end-users. We start by building a data-driven model that links a drought indicator (Standardised Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index; SPEI) with a series of...
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...
This contribution explores the evolution of the flood risk in the MetropolitanArea of Barcelona (MAB; Northeast Spain) from 1981 to 2015, and how it has beenaffected by changes in land use, population and precipitation. To complete this study, weanalysed PRESSGAMA and INUNGAMA databases to look for all the information relatedto the floods and flash flo...
High-resolution meteorological data are necessary to understand and predict climate-driven impacts on the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems. However, the spatial resolution of climate reanalysis data and climate model outputs is often too coarse for studies at local/landscape scales. Additionally, climate model projections usually co...
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...
VALUE is an open European collaboration to intercompare downscaling approaches for climate change research, focusing on different validation aspects (marginal, temporal, extremes, spatial, process‐based, etc.). Here we describe the participating methods and first results from the first experiment, using “perfect” reanalysis (and reanalysis‐driven r...
Floods in the Mediterranean region are often surface
water floods, in which intense precipitation is usually the main driver. Determining the link between the causes and impacts of
floods can make it easier to calculate the level of flood risk. However, up
until now, the limitations in quantitative observations for flood-related
damages have been a...
Advancing our understanding on the impact of climate variability and extremes on crop production is a crucial element in the development of an integrated seasonal crop yield forecasting system. The early prediction of severe weather events can contribute to the mitigation of adverse effects on agricultural production. Due to their poor skill, seaso...
Seasonal crop yield forecasting represents an important source of information to maintain market stability, minimise socio-economic impacts of crop losses and guarantee humanitarian food assistance, while it fosters the use of climate information favouring adaptation strategies. As climate variability and extremes have significant influence on agri...
Disentangling the high- and low-frequency effect of climate oscillations on synchronous seed production would improve our understanding of masting as an ecological process. We show for century-long data that inter-annual and decadal changes of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) drove continent-wide masting of Fagus sylvatica L. (European beech)....
In this paper, we have compared different bias correction methodologies to assess whether they could be advantageous for improving the performance of a seasonal prediction model for volume anomalies in the Boadella reservoir (northwestern Mediterranean). The bias correction adjustments have been applied on precipitation and temperature from the Eur...
Floods in the Mediterranean region are often flash floods, where short and intense precipitation is usually the main driver behind the events. Determining the link between the causes and impacts of floods can help better characterise the level of flood risk. However, up until now limitations in quantitative observations for flood-related damages ha...
Seasonal climate forecasts could be an important planning tool for farmers, government and insurance companies that can lead to better and timely management of seasonal climate risks. However, climate seasonal forecasts are often under-used, because potential users are not well aware of the capabilities and limitations of these products. This study...
Floods are the most critical natural hazard in the world. Consequently, improving mitigation and adaptation strategies to cope with floods has become a key topic in research programs and they are a priority in most government agendas. Yet many uncertainties exist to characterized present and future evolution of floods in Mediterranean urban areas....
Understanding the effects of climate variability and extremes on crop growth and development repre- sents a necessary step to assess the resilience of agricultural systems to changing climate conditions. This study investigates the links between the large-scale atmospheric circulation and crop yields in Europe, providing the basis to develop season...
Mast seeding is a crucial population process in many tree species, but its spatio‐temporal patterns and drivers at the continental scale remain unknown .
Using a large dataset (8000 masting observations across Europe for years 1950–2014) we analysed the spatial pattern of masting across the entire geographical range of European beech, how it is inf...
Offline land surface model (LSM) simulations are useful for studying the continental hydrological cycle. Because of the nonlinearities in the models, the results are very sensitive to the quality of the meteorological forcing; thus, high-quality gridded datasets of screen-level meteorological variables are needed. Precipitation datasets are particu...
In this study we assess the suitability of a recently introduced analog-based Model Output Statistics (MOS) downscaling method (referred to as MOS-Analog) for climate change studies and compare the results with a quantile mapping bias correction method. To this aim, we focus on Spain and consider daily precipitation output from an ensemble of Regio...
Land surface models (LSM) physically simulate the water and the energy balance of the land-surface, including the vegetation. Some of them also simulate river routing and underground water processes. They may be run within a meteorological model (coupled to the atmosphere) or within a climate model (coupled to the atmosphere and the ocean). In addi...
The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential relationship between flash flood events and convective precipitation in Catalonia, as well as any related trends. The paper starts with an overview of flash floods and their trends in the Mediterranean region, along with their associated factors, followed by the definition of, identification of, and...
Offline Land-Surface Model (LSM) simulations are useful for studying the continental hydrological cycle. Because of the nonlinearities in the models, the results are very sensitive to the quality of the meteorological forcing; thus, high-quality gridded datasets of screen-level meteorological variables are needed. Precipitation datasets are particu...
On-going changes in drought, vegetation and wildfires in Israel provide a key example of possible future evolution in transition areas at the border between Mediterranean and arid climates. Here we present multiple lines of evidence suggesting that drought conditions in Israel, representing the eastern Mediterranean, have increased during the perio...
This contribution explores the evolution of land uses, population and precipitation from the middle of the 20th century until now, and how these changes have affected (or not), the flood risk in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (NE of Spain). To do it, the daily rainfall series of Barcelona, el Prat de Llobregat and Fabra Observatory have been an...
On average, floods are the most important natural hazard in the world. Their mitigation and adaptation to the impact that climate change has on them is a priority in most government agendas. Recent reports from the IPCC (2012, 2014) still show significant uncertainty associated with the future development of precipitation extremes and floods. Uncer...
We present an application and validation of the SAFRAN meteorological analysis system for north-east Spain. SAFRAN is also compared to the SPAN analysis system and the meteorological model HIRLAM-HNR, both operational at AEMET. This application of SAFRAN is intended for hydrological studies. This is the first study that shows an application of SAFR...