First MedCLIVAR Workshop on Reconstruction of Past Mediterranean Climate 2006 (original) (raw)

MED-CORDEX initiative for Mediterranean Climate studies

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2015

The Mediterranean is expected to be one of the most prominent and vulnerable climate change “hotspots” of the twenty-first century, and the physical mechanisms underlying this finding are still not clear. Furthermore, complex interactions and feedbacks involving ocean–atmosphere–land–biogeochemical processes play a prominent role in modulating the climate and environment of the Mediterranean region on a range of spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, it is critical to provide robust climate change information for use in vulnerability–impact–adaptation assessment studies considering the Mediterranean as a fully coupled environmental system. The Mediterranean Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (Med-CORDEX) initiative aims at coordinating the Mediterranean climate modeling community toward the development of fully coupled regional climate simulations, improving all relevant components of the system from atmosphere and ocean dynamics to land surface, hydrology, and biogeochemi...

Long-Term Climate Variability in the Mediterranean Region

Atmosphere

The Mediterranean region is an area where prediction at different timescales (subseasonal to decadal or even longer) is challenging. In order to help constrain future projections, the study of past climate is crucial. By improving our knowledge about the past and current climate, our confidence in understanding the future climate will be improved. In this Special Issue, information about long-term climate variability in the Mediterranean region is assessed, including in particular historical climatology and model applications to assess past climate variability, present climate evolution, and future climate projections. The seven articles included in this Special Issue explore observations, proxies, re-analyses, and models for assessing the main characteristics, processes, and variability of the Mediterranean climate. The temporal range of these articles not only covers a wide period going from the present day to as far back as 25 centuries into the past but also covers projections o...

Climate Change in the Mediterranean over the Last Five Hundred Years

Planet Earth 2011 - Global Warming Challenges and Opportunities for Policy and Practice, 2011

Global Warming (GW) is expected to affect the Mediterranean area with three major challenges, i.e. increase in temperature, decrease in precipitation and sea level rise that will likely submerge the coastal areas, including Venice. Aim of this Chapter is to discuss the expected changes under the light of long-term observations. Documentary proxies and instrumental readings in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy have been recovered and analysed. These observations cover the last five centuries from the Little Ice Age (LIA) to the present-day GW. This Chapter is based on documentary proxies and instrumental series collected over the Mediterranean area, i.e. Portugal, Spain, France and Italy (Fig.1) within the EU funded ADVICE, IMPROVE, MILLENNIUM, and Climate for Culture projects. A huge effort was made to seek for written sources and original logs with early and less recent instrumental readings. The next steps were to recover, correct, adjust to modern standards, homogenize and analyse the earliest data and most of the longest European series. The detailed study of the history of the series (e.g. instrument type, calibration, observational methodology, sampling time, exposure, location) and the recovery of any related metadata were fundamental to apply and perform the due corrections to the series. The methodology was presented in previous papers (Camuffo and Jones, 2002, Camuffo et al. 2010a)

Climate Variability and Change in the Mediterranean Region

Global and Planetary Change, 2017

This special issue collects new research results on the climate of the Mediterranean region. It covers traditional topics of the MedCLIVAR programme (www.medclivar.eu, Lionello et al. 2006, Lionello et al. 2012b) being devoted to papers addressing ongoing and future climate changes in the Mediterranean region and their impacts on its environment. In its history, initiated in 2003, MedCLIVAR has promoted research by an intense networking activity, which in its first phase has been based on a set of thematic workshops, schools and exchange grants, from which a series of conferences has subsequently stemmed

White Paper on Mediterranean Climate Variability and Predictability Positioning

The Mediterranean Region has many morphologic, geographical, historical and societal characteristics which make its climate scientifically interesting per se (e.g. Bolle 2003). At the same time, the connotation of "Mediterranean climate" has been extended to define the climate of other (generally smaller) regions and hence it has its own role in the qualitative classification of the different types of climate on Earth (e.g. Köppen, 1936). In general, the qualitative concept of "Mediterranean" climate, is characterized by mild wet winters and warm to hot, dry summers and may occur on the West Side of continents between about 30° and 40° latitude. 0.4 Interactions with Other Projects and Initiatives MedCLIVAR project will benefit from the cooperation with related ongoing efforts in the Mediterranean region. The project "Eau Mediterranee en Atlantique" (EMA) coordinated by X. Carton et al. (2004) is highly relevant to the objectives of the present effort. We have already established contacts with EMA scientists. Another ongoing activity that MedCLIVAR will seek linkages with is the Mediterranean Forecasting System (http://www.bo.ingv.it/mfstep/), a EU Framework 5 project coordinated by N. Pinardi that is contributing to the GODAE. Plans are developing for a Mediterranean GEWEX Continental Scale Experiment proposed by Y. Tourre and J-H. Bolle. Contacts are already established with Y. Tourre for a close coordination during the planning phase.

Two millenia of climate variability in the Central Mediterranean

This experimental work addresses the need for high-resolution, long and homogeneous climatic time series that facilitate the study of climate variability over time scales of decades to millennia. We present a high-resolution record of foraminiferal δ18O from a Central-Mediterranean sediment core that covers the last two millennia. The record was analyzed using advanced spectral methods and shows highly significant oscillatory components with periods of roughly 600, 350, 200, 125 and 11 years. Over the last millennium, our data show several features related to known climatic periods, such as the Medieval Optimum, the Little Ice Age and a recent steep variation since the beginning of the Industrial Era. During the preceding millennium, the δ18O series also reveals a surprising maximum at about 0 AD, suggesting low temperatures at that time. This feature contradicts widely held ideas about the Roman Classical Period; it is, therefore, discussed at some length, by reviewing the somewhat...