A detailed picture of European weather patterns over the past decades is now emerging thanks to an EU-funded project to re-analyse historical records. The results will help EU nations plan for climate change and and extreme weather in coming decades.

Anyone with a smartphone can instantly view weather forecasts for the whole of Europe, but looking for historical data is another matter.

“There is no coordinating organisation at EU level for meteorological data from the past,” says Albert Klein Tank of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Weather systems do not respect national boundaries yet until now researchers had to dig out records held by agencies in each country. The project has remedied this by collecting, combining and consolidating weather records from all 28 EU countries and making them available to anyone in readily usable forms.

The UK participated in the recently finished EU-funded EURO4M project, which was led by Klein Tank with the Netherlands acting as overall co-ordinator.

EURO4M builds on an extensive earlier project called ENSEMBLES that created advanced computer models for predicting climate change.

Weather patterns past and present

By using today’s best models with the historical weather data – gathered from surface stations, balloons and satellites – the nine partners have been able to reconstruct day-to-day weather patterns over Europe as far back as the 1960s.

EURO4M’s climate indicator bulletins, designed for non-specialists, elaborate on different historical weather phenomena. For example, the widespread drought across Europe in autumn 2011, it is suggested, was not consistent with long-term trends that indicate wetter conditions during this season. And the intense flooding in central Europe in May and June of 2013 do not confirm a tendency towards more extreme precipitation events in the region during the warm season. But climate change effects, the bulletin notes, cannot be ruled out completely.

EURO4M also produced a bulletin, commissioned by the European Environment Agency, which looks at temperature trends in Europe. Between 1950 and 2010, the Europe-average warming trend observed a 0.18 ˚C rise per decade, with the warmest years clustered at the end of the timescale studied – consistent with global temperature records.

“The great benefit of these model-based re-analyses is that they provide a complete and consistent picture of the atmosphere, covering the whole three-dimensional domain, not only the observed variables but also those that are not directly measured,” says Klein Tank.

The project’s coarser data sets track weather patterns over a period of 50 to 100 years and the more detailed data sets, made with the most advanced weather models and requiring greater computing resources, go back just two years.

Work will help EU nations to plan for climate change and extreme weather in coming decades

All of the data can be freely downloaded and is already being exploited by other researchers. The work is expected to have long-term economic benefits in helping European nations plan for climate change and extreme events over the coming decades.

In addition, international planning – for the Rhine and Danube river basins, for example – is now much easier thanks to the availability of coherent cross-border data.

EURO4M is now complete but its work is being carried forward into a successor EU-funded project, UERRA, which started in January 2014.

Both projects will feed into the EU’s new climate change service as part of the Copernicus Earth observation programme.