AOPP Seminar - Western European Heatwaves in observations and models

Abstract: Europe has emerged as a global heatwave hotspot in two respects. First, it is warming faster than most other regions of the world (Rousi et al. 2022; Vautard et al. 2023). Second, its most extreme temperatures are rising significantly faster than moderate ones (Patterson 2023; Kornhuber et al. 2024). Among other factors, these trends have been linked to large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns, including double-jet configurations (Rousi et al. 2022), changes in circumglobal Rossby waves (Teng et al. 2022), and persistent high-pressure systems (Vautard et al. 2023). In this talk, we show that current climate models underestimate these trends, and propose a three-way coupling between temperature, soil moisture, and atmospheric pressure as a related mechanism (Tian et al., in press).