Climate Sense

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The importance of high quality regional

scientific information in coping

with global climate change

Ingeborg Auer, Reinhard Böhm and Wolfgang Schöner, Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Austria

AMG, the Austrian weather service, regards the produc-

tion, the quality control and the analysis of high-quality

climate data as one of its core duties. This includes the

maintenance of a meteorological network adequately vast to

cover the complex terrain of the country. However, national

borders do not usually correspond precisely with climate

domains. In the late 1990s ZAMG began formal and informal

cooperation with the national met-services and other data

providers of the greater alpine region (GAR) to create and main-

tain the common climate database HISTALP.

The intention was to aim for the following principles:

• Long-term – fully exploiting the potential of systematically

measured data

• Dense – network density adequate with respect to the spatial

coherence of the given climate element

• Quality improved – outliers removed, gaps filled

• Homogenized – earlier sections adjusted to the recent state of

the measuring site

• Multiple – covering more than one climate element

• User friendly – well described and kept in different

modes for different applications, in scientific research

as well as for technical, educational applications and

for providing quality information about climate vari-

ability and change for the general public.

So far HISTALP has concentrated on longer monthly

series (some 30 of them starting in 1800 and earlier)

allowing us to better solve the homogeneity problem

– for which severe problems still exist with respect to

daily or sub-daily series. However, the first steps towards

the inclusion of daily series are underway. HISTALP

data are kept in three modes: station-mode (original

and homogenized for all seven climate elements); grid-

mode-1 (anomaly series of temperature, precipitation

and air pressure at a grid size of 1 degree latitude-

longitude, respectively); and CRSM-mode (coarse

resolution sub-regional means – anomaly series of all

seven climate elements as spatial means of five principal

sub-regions of the GAR, objectively detected via PCA).

The GAR is climatologically characterized by a

complex terrain of three different large scale climate

regimes: Atlantic-maritime influences from the west

versus continental climate from the east, as well as the

Mediterranean climate with its annual cycle of subtropi-

cal highs further north in the summer and further south

in the winter. These three horizontal regimes are over-

lain by the vertical gradients of all climate parameters.

This makes the region interesting for scientific study;

specifically the study of a situation where nature and

human societies exist in a sensitive mountain region.

The area serves as a great example of the potential

practical applications that can be derived from regional

climate change research.

A few examples serve to illustrate some of the leading

climate change and variability patterns, as well as demon-

strate their scientific and applicative relevance. Firstly,

the GAR has warmed twice as much as the northern

hemisphere land surface since the late 19th century.

The

main driving force behind this additional 1°C warming

above the global background is a northward shift of the

subtropical high pressure system. Put simply, this has

produced more incoming radiation. This synoptic feature

bserving

, P

redicting

and

rojecting

limate

onditions

The greater alpine region in south-central Europe

Showing its five principal horizontal and vertical coarse resolution sub-

regions and the network of HISTALP stations for long climate time series

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