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Unprecedented risk of spring frost damage in Switzerland and Germany in 2017

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Abstract

Spring frosts are feared by farmers, fruit growers, and wine growers as they can cause significant damage to crops when they occur during the development of the plants. In the second half of April 2017, following a very warm period that had caused premature vegetation growth, a cold air mass from the Arctic penetrated central and western Europe, causing severe damage to natural and cultivated vegetation over broad areas. Here, we analyze how exceptional this event was in Switzerland and Germany in relation to the accumulated growing degree days (GDD), used as a proxy for plant phenology advancement. Although this damaging frost was not the latest on record in terms of calendar days, our results show that it was, in some regions, unprecedented in relation to the accumulated warmth during the preceding period, at least since the beginning of instrumental temperature records (1864). Our results also highlight how global warming has considerably increased the number of days with mean temperature above 5 °C in late winter and early spring, especially since 1970 (+ 16.8 ± 4.7 °C days decade−1). However, in spite of earlier spring phenology due to climate warming, our results suggest that the risk of damaging frost events to vegetation has remained unchanged over the last 150 years in lowlands of Switzerland and Germany, due to the concurring earlier occurrence of the last potentially damaging frosts (about − 20 days since 1864). Our analyses reveal therefore that the April 2017 damaging frost was a true outlier in terms of risk of frost damage to plants.

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Acknowledgements

Long-term series of temperature data and the spring phenological index data were provided by MeteoSwiss, the Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology, and Climatology (https://gate.meteoswiss.ch/idaweb, access upon request). We thank Flurin Sutter for his support in drawing the map of the selected stations shown in Fig. 2. We are grateful to Regula Gehrig from MeteoSwiss for providing the data of the Swiss spring phenology index. We are grateful to John Innes for his useful comments and suggestions. The research leading to these results was funded by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN; grant number 09.0064.PJ/P453-1685 and A200.0001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, University of Neuchatel, Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, 2000, Neuchatel, Switzerland

    Yann Vitasse & Martine Rebetez

  2. WSL Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Yann Vitasse

  3. WSL Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Neuchatel, Switzerland

    Martine Rebetez

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  1. Yann Vitasse
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YV and MR designed the research and interpreted the results together. YV analyzed the data and elaborated the figs. YV wrote most of the text after MR wrote the first draft.

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Correspondence to Yann Vitasse.

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Vitasse, Y., Rebetez, M. Unprecedented risk of spring frost damage in Switzerland and Germany in 2017. Climatic Change 149, 233–246 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2234-y

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