Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- The significance of weather and climate extremes to society: an introduction
- I Defining and modeling the nature of weather and climate extremes
- 1 Definition, diagnosis, and origin of extreme weather and climate events
- 2 Observed changes in the global distribution of daily temperature and precipitation extremes
- 3 The spatial distribution of severe convective storms and an analysis of their secular changes
- 4 Regional storm climate and related marine hazards in the Northeast Atlantic
- 5 Extensive summer hot and cold extremes under current and possible future climatic conditions: Europe and North America
- 6 Beyond mean climate change: what climate models tell us about future climate extremes
- 7 Tropical cyclones and climate change: revisiting recent studies at GFDL
- II Impacts of weather and climate extremes
- Index
- Plate section
- References
4 - Regional storm climate and related marine hazards in the Northeast Atlantic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- The significance of weather and climate extremes to society: an introduction
- I Defining and modeling the nature of weather and climate extremes
- 1 Definition, diagnosis, and origin of extreme weather and climate events
- 2 Observed changes in the global distribution of daily temperature and precipitation extremes
- 3 The spatial distribution of severe convective storms and an analysis of their secular changes
- 4 Regional storm climate and related marine hazards in the Northeast Atlantic
- 5 Extensive summer hot and cold extremes under current and possible future climatic conditions: Europe and North America
- 6 Beyond mean climate change: what climate models tell us about future climate extremes
- 7 Tropical cyclones and climate change: revisiting recent studies at GFDL
- II Impacts of weather and climate extremes
- Index
- Plate section
- References
Summary
Introduction
Storms represent a major environmental threat. They are associated with abundant rainfall and excessive winds. Windstorms cause different types of damage on land and sea. On land, infrastructure, houses, and other structures may be damaged. In forests, trees may break in large numbers. At sea, wind drags water masses towards the coasts, where the water levels may become dangerously high, overwhelm coastal defenses, and inundate low-lying coastal areas. In addition, the sea surface is affected: wind waves are created that eventually transform into swell. Obviously, wind waves represent a major threat for shipping, offshore activities, and coastal defenses.
With these hazards and threats in mind, we attempt to answer a number of questions related to windstorms in the Northeast Atlantic and northern European region:
How can we determine decadal and longer variations in the storm climate? The methodological problem is that many variables, which seem to be well suited for this purpose, are available only for too short a period or suffer from inhomogeneities; i.e., their trends are contaminated by signals related to the observation process (e.g., changes in instrumentation, observational practice, or surrounding environmental conditions). Useful indicators of storm climate variation may be derived from a variety of data, including air pressure readings at weather stations and water level readings at tide gauges.
How has the storm climate developed in the past few decades and past few centuries? Storm activity over the Northeast Atlantic and northern Europe increased for a few decades after the 1960s following an earlier downward trend that started in about 1900. When longer periods are considered (such as by analyzing air pressure readings at stations in Sweden since about 1800), no significant changes are found.
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- Type
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- Information
- Climate Extremes and Society , pp. 54 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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