Climate of the Carpathian Region in the period 1961–2010: climatologies and trends of 10 variables

The Carpathians are the largest mountain range in Europe and they represent a geographic barrier between Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. In order to investigate the climate of the area, the CARPATCLIM project members compiled the Climate Atlas of the Carpathian Region, which consists of high-resolution daily grids (0.1˚ x 0.1˚) of sixteen meteorological variables and many derived indicators related to 1961-2010. We computed the gridded climatologies for 1961-2010 for eight variables (air pressure, cloudiness, precipitation, relative humidity, minimum and maximum temperature, sunshine duration, and wind speed) and we discuss their spatial patterns. For each variable, we calculated the gridded linear trends related to 1961-2010 both on annual and seasonal basis. In general, temperature was found to increase in every season in 1986-2010, confirming the trends occurring in Europe in the last decades. On the other way, wind speed decreased in every season. Cloudiness and relative humidity decreased in spring, summer, and winter, and increased in autumn, whilst sunshine duration, as expected, behaved in the opposite way. Precipitation slightly increased and air pressure showed no significant trend, except of a few grid points. Then, we dealt with the correlation between the variables: excluding the high elevation points, the most correlated are sunshine duration and temperature. In particular, positive and negative sunshine duration anomalies are found to be respectively correlated with positive and negative temperature anomalies during the global dimming (60’s and 70’s) and brightening (90’s and 2000’s) periods.JRC.H.7-Climate Risk Managemen