The damages from climatic extremes have dramatically increased in the last decades in Europe, as likely outcomes of climate change: floods, droughts, heat waves and hailstorms have brought local as well as widespread damages to farmers, industry, infrastructures and society, to insurance and reinsurance companies; in this work we deal with the hailstorm hazard. The NCEP-NCAR Reanalysis (2.5 by ...

This paper evaluates climate change effects on drought severity in the region of Thessaly, Greece. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) has been used for estimation of drought severity. A geographical information system is applied for the division of Thessaly region to twelve hydrological homogeneous areas based on their geomorphology. Mean monthly precipitation values from 50 precipitati...

Nonlinear projections (NLP) of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index onto North American winter (December–March) 500-mb geopotential height (Z500) and surface air temperature (SAT) anomalies reveal a pronounced asymmetry in the atmospheric patterns associated with positive and negative phases of the AO. In a linear view, the Z500 anomaly field associated with positive AO resembles a positive North ...

The boreal forest contains large reserves of carbon. Across this region, wildfires influence the temporal and spatial dynamics of carbon storage. In this study, we estimate fire emissions and changes in carbon storage for boreal North America over the 21st century. We use a gridded data set developed with a multivariate adaptive regression spline approach to determine how area burned varies eac...

Climate is one of the main drivers of species distribution. However, as different environmental factors tend to co-vary, the effect of climate cannot be taken at face value, as it may be either inflated or obscured by other correlated factors. We used the favourability models of four species (Alytes dickhilleni, Vipera latasti, Aquila fasciata and Capra pyrenaica) inhabiting Spanish mountains a...

Climate has a strong influence on the tourism and recreation sector and in some regions represents the natural resource on which the tourism industry is predicated. There has been little consideration of how climate change might affect the tourism climate resource or how such changes could alter the competitive relationships between tourism destinations. This study used a modified version of Mi...

Cherry blossoms, an icon of spring, are celebrated in many cultures of the temperate region. For its sensitivity to winter and early spring temperatures, the timing of cherry blossoms is an ideal indicator of the impacts of climate change on tree phenology. Here, we applied a process-based phenology model for temperate deciduous trees to predict peak bloom dates (PBD) of flowering cherry trees ...

Climate Change refers to any systematic change in the long-term statistics of climate elements (such as temperature, pressure, or winds) sustained over several decades or longer time periods. General Circulation Models (GCMs) are tools designed to simulate time series of climate variables globally, accounting for effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and resulting global climate change....