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Atmospheric conditions and weather regimes associated with extreme winter dry spells over the Mediterranean basin

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Abstract

Very long dry spell events occurring during winter are natural hazards to which the Mediterranean region is extremely vulnerable, because they can lead numerous impacts for environment and society. Four dry spell patterns have been identified in a previous work. Identifying the main associated atmospheric conditions controlling the dry spell patterns is key to better understand their dynamics and their evolution in a changing climate. Except for the Levant region, the dry spells are generally associated with anticyclonic blocking conditions located about 1000 km to the Northwest of the affected area. These anticyclonic conditions are favourable to dry spell occurrence as they are associated with subsidence of cold and dry air coming from boreal latitudes which bring low amount of water vapour and non saturated air masses, leading to clear sky and absence of precipitation. These extreme dry spells are also partly related to the classical four Euro-Atlantic weather regimes are: the two phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Scandinavian “blocking” or “East-Atlantic”, and the “Atlantic ridge”. Only the The “East-Atlantic”, “Atlantic ridge” and the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation are frequently associated with extremes dry spells over the Mediterranean basin but they do not impact the four dry spell patterns equally. Finally long sequences of those weather regimes are more favourable to extreme dry spells than short sequences. These long sequences are associated with the favourable prolonged and reinforced anticyclonic conditions

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Acknowledgements

This work is a contribution to the HYdrological cycle in The Mediterranean EXperiment (HyMeX) program, through INSU-MISTRALS support. The authors are grateful to Marc Stéfanon for providing his heatwave identification processing software, which has been adapted to the context of droughts. We acknowledge the E-OBS data set from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu). The NCEP/NCAR Re-analysis data used in this study were obtained from the Earth System Research Laboratory/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data server (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Recherches de Climatologie, Biogéosciences, Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon, France

    Florian Raymond, Albin Ullmann & Pierre Camberlin

  2. LSCE/IPLS, Laboratoire CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Gif/Yvette, France

    Boutheina Oueslati

  3. Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, CNRS, École Polytechnique Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Palaiseau, Paris, France

    Philippe Drobinski

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  1. Florian Raymond
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  4. Boutheina Oueslati
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  5. Philippe Drobinski
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Correspondence to Florian Raymond.

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Raymond, F., Ullmann, A., Camberlin, P. et al. Atmospheric conditions and weather regimes associated with extreme winter dry spells over the Mediterranean basin. Clim Dyn 50, 4437–4453 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3884-6

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