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Publications (338)
Agricultural production in Central South America (CSA) is substantially influenced by frost events. This study characterises and quantifies the physical processes leading to frost conditions in CSA from 1979 to 2022, focusing on three innovative aspects: regional frost properties, a novel multi-parametric upper-level jet description, and the quanti...
Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is altering the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Attributing individual extreme events (EEs) to ACC is becoming crucial to assess the risks of climate change. Traditional attribution methods often suffer from a selection bias, are computationally demanding, and provide answers after the EE occurs...
Flash droughts (FDs) are distinguished by a rapid development associated with strong precipitation deficits and/or increases in atmospheric evaporative demand in the short‐term, but little is known about the atmospheric conditions underlying these events. In this study, we analyse for the first time the atmospheric dynamics involved in the developm...
This study analyzes the relationship between drought processes and crop yields in Moldova, together with the effects of possible future climate change on crops. The severity of drought is analyzed over time in Moldova using the Standard Precipitation Index, the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, and their relationship with crop yi...
In the austral summer of 2022/23, Argentina experienced an unusually hot season. The occurrence of multiple heat waves during this season could be attributed to various factors operating on different time scales. On the synoptic scale, anticyclonic anomalies were necessary for these events to occur. On the interannual scale, the region experienced...
The summer of 2022/23 in Argentina set a record with ten heatwaves. Here, we compare the synoptic and thermodynamic conditions of the four heatwaves with the largest spatial extent using ERA5 reanalysis data. All heatwaves were associated with mid-level anticyclonic anomalies but with different characteristics: three were quasi-stationary high-pres...
In the Amazon basin, biomass burning has been identified as a major cause of poor regional air quality and the dominant source of particulate matter (PM). In this study, we analyse the impact of the upper-level jet on PM2.5 (PM with an aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm) concentrations in tropical South America (SA) from December to February during the...
The North Atlantic eddy‐driven jet (EDJ) is the main driver of winter weather in Europe and has often been described by its latitude or strength. Here, we show that the influence of the EDJ on European winter temperature extremes can be better characterized by a multiparametric perspective that accounts for additional aspects of the EDJ structure (...
El objetivo general planteado en el proyecto “Creación de recursos prácticos y digitales de meteorología y clima a través de Metolab“ era avanzar en la utilización, en las aulas de las asignaturas de meteorología y clima del Grado en Física y del Máster en Meteorología y Geofísica de la UCM, de los recursos proporcionados por la página web Meteolab...
The upper-level jet stream is a critical element of atmospheric circulation, driving synoptic systems and extreme weather events. This study analyzes the impact of upper-level jets on South American (SA) summer temperature and precipitation under different El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phases. Using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset from 1979 to 20...
The upper-level jet stream is a crucial component of atmospheric circulation, as it propels synoptic systems and their associated extreme weather events. In addition, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most significant driver of global interannual variability, exerting its influence on temperature and precipitation patterns worldwide th...
This paper assesses whether moving summer holidays to the warmest period of the year in Spain could be a useful climate change adaptation strategy. While the most popular period for Spanish summer holidays has traditionally been August, we illustrate that the second half of July is the hottest period of the year and when the negative effects of hig...
Atmospheric extreme events cause severe damage to human societies and ecosystems. The frequency and intensity of extremes and other associated events are continuously increasing due to climate change and global warming. The accurate prediction, characterization, and attribution of atmospheric extreme events is, therefore, a key research field in wh...
Air stagnation refers to an extended period of clear, stable conditions which can favour the accumulation of pollutants in the lower atmosphere. In Europe, weather conditions are strongly mediated by the North Atlantic eddy-driven jet stream. Descriptions of the jetstream typically focus on its latitudinal position or the strength of its wind speed...
In 1639, the German naturalist Georg Marcgraf established the first astronomical observatory in the Americas, located in Recife (Brazil). There, he made the first daily systematic meteorological observations of wind direction, precipitation, fog, and thunder and lightning from 1640 to 1642. We outline the circumstances that led to this observatory...
Documentary climate data describe evidence of past climate arising from predominantly written historical documents such as diaries, chronicles, newspapers, or logbooks. Over the past decades, historians and climatologists have generated numerous document-based time series of local and regional climates. However, a global dataset of documentary clim...
This study describes the climatological characteristics of regional heat waves (HWs) over southern South America (SSA) for the warm seasons (October–March) of 1979–2018 based on daily maximum temperature series from 131 weather stations. Clustering of stations with high co-occurrence of simultaneous HW days is employed to identify regional HW event...
Heat waves (HWs) can cause large socioeconomic and environmental impacts. The observed increases in their frequency, intensity and duration are projected to continue with global warming. This review synthesizes the state of knowledge and scientific challenges. It discusses different aspects related to the definition, triggering mechanisms, observed...
Extreme weather events are expected to increase due to climate change, which could pose an additional burden of morbidity and mortality. In recent decades, drought severity has increased in several regions around the world, affecting health by increasing the risk of water-, food-, and vector-borne diseases, malnutrition, cardiovascular and respirat...
The North Atlantic eddy-driven jet (EDJ) is an essential component of the Euro-Atlantic atmospheric circulation. It has been typically described in terms of latitude and intensity but this is not enough to fully characterize its variability and complex EDJ configurations. Here, we present a set of daily parameters of the EDJ based on low-tropospher...
Air pollution is a major environmental threat to human health. Pollutants can reach extreme levels in the lower atmosphere when weather conditions permit. As pollutant concentrations depend on scales and processes that are not fully represented in current global circulation models (GCMs), and it is often too computationally expensive to run models...
Great advances in meteorological science were made in the late eighteenth century. In particular, meteorological instruments were carried on ships and the first systematic meteorological readings over the oceans were made. One of these collections of instrumental meteorological readings was carried out by the Malaspina expedition (1789–94), organiz...
Atmospheric Extreme Events (EEs) cause severe damages to human societies and ecosystems. The frequency and intensity of EEs and other associated events are increasing in the current climate change and global warming risk. The accurate prediction, characterization, and attribution of atmospheric EEs is therefore a key research field, in which many g...
This paper analyses the dependency of regional air pollution in Europe on the atmospheric circulation as represented by a set of 8 weather regimes (WRs). For this purpose, daily average PM2.5 concentrations and daily maximum concentrations of O3, NO2 and CO obtained from an atmospheric composition reanalysis have been used. The results indicate tha...
This study provides a long-term (1891–2014) global assessment of precipitation trends using data from two station-based gridded datasets and climate model outputs evolved through the fifth and sixth phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5 and CMIP6, respectively). Our analysis employs a variety of modeling groups that incorporate...
Great advances in meteorological science were made in the late 18th century. In particular, meteorological instruments were carried on ships and the first systematic meteorological readings over the oceans were made. One of these collections of instrumental meteorological readings was carried out by the Malaspina expedition (1789-1794), organized b...
In this research we make use of historical wind direction observations to assemble an instrumental upwelling intensity index (the so‐called Directional Upwelling Index [DUI]) for the coast of Northwest Africa between 26° and 33°N and from 1825 to 2014. The DUI is defined as the persistence of the alongshore winds at the coast and unlike other upwel...
Main modes of atmospheric variability exert a significant influence on weather and climate at local and regional scales on all time scales. However, their past changes and variability over the instrumental record are not well constrained due to limited availability of observations, particularly over the oceans. Here we couple a reconstruction metho...
Most of the records refer to hydroclimatic conditions, and therefore we have built a series showing the frequency of dry/wet events in every twenty-year period, as seen in Figure 3. For Iberia, the series ends in the fourteenth century, when the Arabic settlement started its decline. For Morocco and North Africa, the series covers the period from A...
Archival records and historical documents offer direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions and have the highest temporal and spatial resolution, and precise dating, of the available climate proxies. They also provide information about variables such as temperature, precipitation, and climate extremes, as well as floods, droughts and s...
We present a climatological study of aerosols in four representative Caribbean islands based on daily mean values of aerosol optical properties for the period 2008- 2016, using the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and Ångström Exponent (AE) to classify the dominant aerosol type. A climatological assessment of the spatio-temporal distribution of the main...
Storylines of atmospheric circulation change, or physically self-consistent narratives of plausible future events, have recently been proposed as a non-probabilistic means to represent uncertainties in climate change projections. Here, we apply the storyline approach to 21st century projections of summer air stagnation over Europe and the United St...
The present study analyses changes in the timing and duration of the hot days season over the Middle East and North Africa region from 1970 to 2099 using model simulations of 11 regional models from the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment under the RCP8.5 scenario. In general, a non‐symmetrical lengthening of the hot days season is...
The build-up of pollutants to harmful levels can occur when meteorological conditions favour their production or accumulation near the surface. Such conditions can arise when a region experiences air stagnation. The link between European air stagnation, air pollution and the synoptic- to large-scale circulation is investigated in this article acros...
Climate proxy data are required for improved understanding of climate variability and change in the pre-instrumental period. We present the first international initiative to compile and share information on pro pluvia rogation ceremonies, which is a well-studied proxy of agricultural drought. Currently, the database has more than 3500 dates of cele...
Archival records and historical documents offer direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions and have the highest temporal and spatial resolution, and precise dating, of the available climate proxies. They also provide information about variables such as temperature, precipitation and climate extremes, as well as floods, droughts and st...
Archival records and historical documents offer direct observation of weather and atmospheric conditions and have the highest temporal and spatial resolution, and precise dating, of the available climate proxies. They also provide information about variables such as temperature, precipitation, and climate extremes, as well as floods, droughts and s...
Blockings are high-impact atmospheric systems of mid/high-latitudes and have been widely addressed in meteorological and climatological studies. However, the diversity of blocking definitions makes comparison across studies not straightforward. Here, we propose a conceptual model for the life-cycle of high-pressure systems that recognizes the multi...
In this study, we make use of historical wind direction observations to assemble an instrumental upwelling index (DUI) at the southern end of the Canary Current Upwelling System. The DUI covers the period between 1825 and 2014 and, unlike other upwelling indices, it does not rely neither in wind speed nor in reanalyzed data. In this sense, the DUI...
This paper evaluates the influence that climate change could exert on electricity demand patterns in Spain conditioned on the level of warming, with special attention to the seasonal occurrence of extreme demand days. For this purpose, assuming the currently observed electricity demand–temperature relationship holds in the future, we have generated...
This work provides an assessment of the two most intense seasonal droughts that occurred over the Balsas River Basin (BRB) in the period 1980–2017. The detection of the drought events was performed using the 6 month scale standardized precipitation–evapotranspiration index (SPEI-6) and the 6 month standardized precipitation index (SPI-6) in October...
The build-up of pollutants to harmful levels can occur when meteorological conditions favour their production or accumulation near the surface. Previous studies have shown that such conditions are often associated with air stagnation. Understanding the development of stagnant conditions is therefore crucial for studying poor air quality. The link b...
Different air stagnation indices (ASIs) have been proposed to measure the atmospheric diffusion conditions. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of three ASIs and explores their ability to capture the conditions conducive to elevated PM10 (particulate matter ≤10 μm) at 306 background sites in Europe for the winter and summer months of 2000–...
In this paper, we show a new clustering technique (k-gaps) aiming to generate a robust regionalization using sparse climate datasets with incomplete information in space and time. Hence, this method provides a new approach to cluster time series of different temporal lengths, using most of the information contained in heterogeneous sets of climate...
Two separate heatwaves affected western Europe in June and July 2019, in particular France, Belgium, the Netherlands, western Germany and northeastern Spain. Here we compare the European 2019 summer temperatures to multi-proxy reconstructions of temperatures since 1500, and analyze the relative influence of synoptic conditions and soil-atmosphere f...
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 analysed 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...
This paper analyses the impact of the control measures during the COVID-19 lockdown in Europe (15 March–30 April 2020) on 1-h daily maximum nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and maximum daily 8-h running average ozone (MDA8 O3) observations obtained from the European Environment Agency's air quality database (AirBase). Daily maximum NO2 decreased consistently...
In the Era of exponential data generation, increasing the number of paleoclimate records to improve climate field reconstructions might not always be the best strategy. By using pseudo-proxies from different model ensembles, we show how biologically-inspired artificial intelligence can be coupled with different reconstruction methods to minimize th...
We have assessed the dependency of wind power resources in Western Europe on the atmospheric circulation as represented by a new set of 8 tailored weather regimes (WRs). For this purpose, we have derived wind capacity factors (CFs) from a meteorological reanalysis dataset and from high-resolution data simulated by the Weather Research and Forecasti...
Background
Investigating future changes in temperature-related mortality as a function of global mean temperature (GMT) increases allows for the evaluation of policy-relevant climate change targets. So far, only few studies have taken this approach, and, in particular, no such assessments exist for Germany, the most populated country of Europe.
Me...
Wind direction kept in ships’ logbooks is a consolidated but underexploited observational source of relevant climatic information. In this paper, we present four indices of the monthly frequency of wind direction, one for each cardinal direction: Northerly (NI), Easterly (EI), Southerly (SI) and Westerly (WI), based on daily wind direction observat...
A global inventory of early instrumental meteorological measurements is compiled that comprises thousands of mostly nondigitized series, pointing to the potential of weather data rescue.
This paper presents a new heatwave (HW) detection algorithm that identifies spatially coherent HW patterns on synoptic scales and their temporal evolution, yielding the main characteristics (extension, intensity or persistence) of HW events (HWEs). The algorithm has been applied to temperature data from the ERA-Interim reanalysis in order to derive...
We have examined the joint impact of daily maximum temperature and air stagnation on observed maximum daily 8-h running average (MDA8) and hourly near-surface ozone (O3) over eight regions of Europe for the summer period 1998–2015. The percentage of stagnant area in a region is a better predictor of summer MDA8 O3 in central/southern Europe (correl...
Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated “early instrumental data.” They have played an important role in climate research as they allow daily to decadal variability and changes of temperature, pressure, and precipitation, including extremes, to be addressed. Early instrume...
The summers of 2018 and 2019 were characterized by unusually warm conditions over Europe. Here, we describe the intense heatwaves striking the Iberian Peninsula in early August 2018 and late June 2019. The 2018 episode was relatively short-lived but outstanding in amplitude, particularly in western Iberia. Similar to previous mega-heatwaves, the 20...
Recent studies have stressed the key role of the east Atlantic (EA) pattern and its interactions with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) in Euro-Atlantic climate variability. However, instrumental records of these leading patterns of variability are short, hampering a proper characterization of the atmospheric circulation beyond the mid-nineteent...
In this paper, we develop an instrumental index based on historical wind direction observations aimed to quantify the moisture transport from the tropical Pacific to Central and northern South America at a monthly scale. This transport is mainly driven by the so-called “Chocó jet”, a low-level westerly jet whose core is located at 5∘ N and 80∘ W. T...
The weather diary of Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros was recorded in Mexico City from 1775 to 1786. It is the earliest meteorological observational record of Mexico. The diary provides daily meteorological information for rain frequency, temperature, frost, hail, thunderstorms, and wind, with higher resolution than any other contemporary documentation...
In this paper we tackle a problem of representative measuring points selection for temperature field reconstruction. This problem is a version of the more general Representative Selection (RS) problem, well-known in computer and data science. In this particular case, the objective is to select the best set of N measuring points (i.e. N representati...
We have analysed the impact of the North Atlantic jet on the winter PM 10 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 10 μm) concentrations in Europe during a 10-year period. For this purpose we have extracted the daily latitude and strength of the jet from a reanalysis dataset and surface PM 10 observations from the AirBase network. We show th...
We have analyzed the record-breaking drought that affected western and central Europe from July 2016 to June 2017. It caused widespread impacts on water supplies, agriculture, and hydroelectric power production, and was associated with forest fires in Iberia. Unlike common continental-scale droughts, this event displayed a highly unusual spatial pa...
The summer circulation over the eastern Mediterranean is characterized by a persistent northerly regime whose interannual variability is modulated both by mid and tropical latitudes. In this paper, we use historical wind observations taken aboard ships to assemble the first purely instrumental index quantifying this wind system since 1880. This has...