Rita Pongracz

Eötvös Loránd University · Department of Meteorology

Az előadás célja, hogy bemutassa, felfedezhetőek-e objektíven detektálható és statisztikai szempontból szignifikáns változások Kelet-Közép-Európa egyik leghosszabb homogenizált hőmérsékleti adatsorában. A globális tendenciához hasonlóan a keszthelyi éves középhőmérsékleti idősorban is azonosítható a huszadik század eleji felmelegedés (a továbbiakba...

Due to its high influence on agriculture, infrastructure, water management, and other areas, precipitation is one of the most important climate factors. However, it is still challenging for climate models to realistically reproduce regional patterns, temporal variability, and precipitation intensity. This is especially true for extreme conditions a...

The goal of the present paper is to investigate whether any objectively defined and statistically significant changes can be discovered in one of the longest homogenized instrumental temperature records in East-Central Europe. Thus, it is hoped that the present analysis will add to earlier attempts and elucidate the persistence of the warming perio...

Az ENSZ Éghajlatváltozási Kormányközi Testülete (IPCC) 2021–22-ben publikálta a klímaváltozással kapcsolatos 6. Értékelő jelentését. Ennek részeként elérhetővé vált az adatsorokat, szcenáriókat egy helyen összegyűjtő Interaktív Atlasz is. Ennek segítségével cikkünkben a három európai IPCC-nagyrégióban hőmérsékleti extrémumok jövőben várható gyakori...

In Hungary, the regular precipitation measurements began in the 1850s under the direction of the then Austrian Meteorological Institute based in Vienna, and from 1870 onwards continued under the Budapest-based "Meteorológiai és Földdelejességi Magyar Királyi Központi Intézet", now HungaroMet Hungarian Meteorological Service. Over the decades, the m...

Az éghajlatváltozás és annak hatásai kapcsán egyre több figyelem fordul az ún. összetett események felé. Ezek közé tartozik, amikor több éghajlati változó egyidejű szélsőségessége miatt a kisebb egyedi hatások helyett erőteljesebb környezeti következményekkel kell számolnunk. Cikkünk a magyarországi szeles és egyben csapadékos események elemzésére...

The Western Cape province, home to the majority of South Africa’s viniculture, is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This study validates the Co-ordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) temperature and precipitation outputs along with their vinicultural bioclimatic indices over the Western Cape for the historic pe...

Tanulmányunkban a Felső-Tisza vidékére a klímaváltozásból eredő felszíni lefolyás várható megváltozását célzó becsléseink eredményeit foglaljuk össze, amelyeket szekvenciálisan végrehajtott többmodelles szimulációk alkalmazásával nyertünk. Az elemzés meteorológiai adatait a historikus időszakra a CARPATCLIM adatbázis, a jövőre pedig a RegCM4 region...

Climate change is leading to new daily record-breaking values globally. Since there is a clear shift towards the higher temperature values, the ratio of the numbers of new record high temperatures to record lows indicates the acceleration of global warming differently at regional levels—but is there an amplification for precipitation records as wel...

Significant increases of extreme precipitation and drought events have been detected in Europe in the past few decades. In this study, 16 selected climate indices (11 recommended by the Expert Team of Climate Change and Indices) were used for the analysis of the temporal changes and spatial distribution of precipitation patterns in European plain r...

The lack of precipitation may cause severe damage in different sectors, especially in agriculture and forestry, therefore, its analysis is a key element of adaptation strategies in the changing climate. In the present study, we selected different climate indices as important indicators for forests to investigate the current and future wet and dry c...

Temperature and precipitation simulations are evaluated for Hungary based on 11 regional climate model experiments with 0.1° horizontal resolution from the EURO‐CORDEX programme. The aim of the study is to assess the different simulations and the multi‐model (MM) mean as well for 1991–2005 and 2006–2020 separately, on a monthly basis. For the perio...

Gridded observational datasets are often used for the evaluation of regional climate model (RCM) simulations. However, the uncertainty of observations affects the evaluation. This work introduces a novel method to quantify the uncertainties in the observational datasets and how these uncertainties affect the evaluation of RCM simulations. Besides p...

Precipitation is a highly variable meteorological element. Similarly, to other meteorological elements (e.g. temperature), the changes in the measurement practices or in the environment can cause inhomogeneities in the precipitation data series. Therefore, homogenization of precipitation data series is necessary before studying the long‐term climat...

Snow has an important role in the climate system and also has environmental, natural and socio-economic impacts. Temperature, precipitation, snow coverage, snow depth and snowmelt are analysed in this study for 1971–2099 based on EURO-CORDEX simulations. In order to measure uncertainty, three different scenarios (RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP8.5) and five di...

In addition to the one-dimensional mathematical statistical methods used to study the climate and its possible variations, the study of several elements together is also worthwhile. Here, a combined analysis of precipitation and temperature time series was performed using the norm method based on the probability distribution of the elements. This m...

Climate studies, particularly those that are related to climate change, require long, high-quality controlled data sets, which are representative both spatially and temporally. Changing the conditions of measurements, for example relocating the station, or changing the frequency and timing of measurements, or changing the instruments used can cause...

Urban air (T a) and surface (T s) temperature patterns depend mainly on the surface cover conditions. WUDAPT methodology was used to create the local climate zone (LCZ) map of Szeged (Hungary) providing detailed information about the structure of the urban area. The seasonal and monthly variations of simultaneous measurements of T a (urban network)...

Snow-related variables are analysed in the present paper in the period 1901‒2010 on the basis of the ERA-20C dataset. Relationships between different snow characteristics, temperature and the NAO index are investigated on monthly, yearly and decadal scales for eight regions within Europe representing different climatic types (i.e. oceanic, continen...

The aim of our study is to analyse the spatial patterns and temporal trends of average and extreme precipitation events in a few selected plain regions between 1951 and 2019. Besides the Great Hungarian Plain we chose two plain regions located in the southern part of the continent (i.e. the Po Valley and the Romanian Plain) with the purpose of comp...

The evaluation of general circulation models (GCM) is a fundamental step in climate research in terms of both quality assurance/quality control and realistic representation of the dynamics of the atmospheric flows in the future projections. In this paper, a statistical method is introduced to evaluate GCMs with respect to teleconnection patterns in...

This study analyses long‐term changes in drought indices (Standardised Precipitation Index—SPI, Standardised Precipitation–Evapotranspiration Index—SPEI) at 1 and 3 months scales at 182 stations in 11 central and eastern European countries during 1949–2018. For comparative purposes, the necessary atmospheric evaporative demand (AED) to obtain SPEI...

Cold air pool (CAP) is a winter-time, anticyclonic weather event: a cold air layer confined by the topography and warm air aloft. If its duration is more than one day, then it is called persistent cold air pool (PCAP). CAPs are mainly examined in small basins and valleys. Fewer studies pay attention to PCAPs in much larger basins (with an area of m...

The built environment has a very complex role in cities. On the one hand, various urban climatological phenomena are caused and influenced by buildings (e.g., urban heat island effect, local wind conditions, air pollution). On the other hand, buildings are important contributors to energy use via heating and cooling, e.g. they account for about 40%...

The impact of climate change on runoff characteristics is investigated for the Upper Tisza basin, in eastern Central Europe. For a reliable estimation of uncertainty, an appropriate stochastic weather generator is embedded into a Monte Carlo cycle capable of generating any large number of independent, equally probable, 100-year-long daily sequences...

The current study focuses on the RegCM4.5 model and specifically on a comparison of hydrostatic and non‐hydrostatic approaches as well as on different microphysical parameterisations and planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes. The main goal of the paper is to simulate the historical regional precipitation characteristics of the Carpathian region as...

Atmospheric teleconnections are characteristic to the climate system and exert major impacts on the global and regional climate. Accurate representation of teleconnections by general circulation models (GCMs) is indispensable given their fundamental role in the large scale circulation patterns. In this study a statistical method is introduced to ev...

The paper investigates the reference corpus of a climate change contrarian report. We categorized the journal abstracts according to the endorsement positions on anthropogenic climate change. These results were contrasted by an in-text citation analysis. We focused here on the role of the papers included by the report editors concerning the mainstr...

Full text available until 14 March: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aSOB3QCo9YdMq

Urban and rural thermal properties mainly depend on surface cover features as well as vegetation cover. Surface classification using the local climate zone (LCZ) system provides an appropriate approach for distinguishing urban and rural areas, as well as comparing the surface urban heat island (SUHI) of climatically different regions. Our goal is t...

This study aims to give a brief overview of an ensemble of regional climate model (RCM) simulations with and without bias correction for daily precipitation for the Carpathian Region located in Central/Eastern Europe. Within the international initiative called the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), EURO-CORDEX and Med-CORDEX prov...

Built-up areas with non-natural surface covers generate the urban heat island (UHI) effect. To investigate this in greater spatial extensions, satellite data provide sufficient spatial coverage without unnecessary time lag effect within the region. Moreover, it is very costly to operate a meteorological station system with a suitable density. Altho...

The Penman-Monteith (PM) method for estimation of reference evapotranspiration (ET0) uses numerous data that are often missing in many regions. In such circumstances, temperature-based equations can be used for estimating ET0. The primary objective of this note was to compare the calibrated temperature-based ET0 approaches with the standard PM equa...

Evapotranspiration is one of the crucial components of hydrological cycle. The Penman-Monteith method (PM) is recommended as the sole standard method for estimating reference evapotranspiration (ET0). The usage of the PM method is limited in many regions due to the lack of required weather data. In such circumstances, simple Thornthwaite equation i...

Variation in climatic conditions is an important driving force of ecological processes. Populations are under selection to respond to climatic changes with respect to phenology of the annual cycle (e.g. breeding, migration) and life‐history. As teleconnections can reflect climate on a global scale, the responses of terrestrial animals are often inv...

Introduction The changing of some meteorological parameters have major burden on the human body. That's why it became necessary to adopt to the altering conditions. The air temperature, atmospheric pressure have a significant influence on the patient's physical shape, blood pressure and response to stress. The aim of our study was to assess the imp...

Weather is known to affect the phenology and behaviour of birds, but weather‐related changes of phenotypic traits involved in communication have received little attention. Using an eight‐year data set, we investigated links between carotenoid‐based reflectance of the freshly moulted breast of Great Tits Parus major, weather during the moulting peri...

Past and future global climate changes can be analyzed on the basis of global climate models. For regional scale analysis, the downscaling of the simulation results of global models is necessary. For this purpose physically-based regional climate models are commonly used tools. The projected climate change for the Carpathian region is presented in...

In recent years, several unusual (or at least very rare) weather events occurred in the Carpathian Basin, e.g., the severe snow in March 2013. We are assuming that this anomaly may be a part of the climate change-related macro-scale circulation changes, especially the changes in the characteristics of polar jetstream. For evaluating this hypothesis...

The ratio of buildings, streets, and other artificially covered areas are increasing in cities. Ferencváros is an inner district of Budapest, the capital city of Hungary. For the local government of the district it is an important goal in the framework of the urban development planning to increase the proportion of vegetation since green areas have...

The aim of this study is to analyse the thermal properties of natural and artificial urban surfaces and the impact of surface colours and shading. Measuring campaigns were conducted in spring and summer (2018-2019) in the district XI of Budapest to determine the surface temperature of various urban materials. The results show that the coolest surfa...

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...

Credible information about the properties and changes of extreme events on the regional and local scales is of prime importance in the context of future climate change. Within the EU‐COST Action VALUE a comprehensive validation framework for downscaling methods has been developed. Here we present validation results for extremes of temperature and p...

Recent publications are reviewed in the context of urban health issues possibly resulting from global climate change. The most important phenomena having an impact on health discussed in the paper include increased ultraviolet radiation due to stratospheric ozone, temperature-related effects, precipitation-related effects (both excessive precipitat...

In this paper, expected changes in the spatial and altitudinal distribution patterns of Holdridge life zone (HLZ) types are analysed to assess the possible ecological impacts of future climate change for the Carpathian Region, by using 11 bias-corrected regional climate model simulations of temperature and precipitation. The distribution patterns o...

In order to satisfy the continuous urging demands for updated and relevant information from various impact researchers, end-users, and decision makers, the RegCM4.3 model is used taking into account the new RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 radiative forcing scenarios to provide climate projection for Hungary with 10 km horizontal resolution. Overall, the results...

In order to satisfy the continuous urging demands for updated and relevant information from various impact researchers, end-users, and decision makers, the RegCM4.3 model is used taking into account the new RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 radiative forcing scenarios to provide climate projection for Hungary with 10 km horizontal resolution. Overall, the results...

Heat waves (HWs) associated with climate change and increased near-surface air temperature can be considered as a climatic hazard for people and the environment. This study evaluates six HW detecting methods and the estimated HW characteristics (duration, frequency and intensity) from observational (CarpatClim database) and modelled (RegCM simulati...