Changes in heat wave characteristics over Extremadura (SW Spain)

Abstract

Heat wave (HW) events are becoming more frequent, and they have important consequences because of the negative effects they can have not only on the human population in health terms but also on biodiversity and agriculture. This motivated a study of the trends in HW events over Extremadura, a region in the southwest of Spain, with much of its area in summer devoted to the production of irrigated crops such as maize and tomatoes. Heat waves were defined for the study as two consecutive days with temperatures above the 95th percentile of the summer (June–August) maximum temperature (T max) time series. Two datasets were used: One consisted of 13 daily temperature records uniformly distributed over the Region, and the other was the SPAIN02 gridded observational dataset, extracting just the points corresponding to Extremadura. The trends studied were in the duration, intensity and frequency of HW events, and in other parameters such as the mean, low (25th percentile) and high (75th percentile) values. In general terms, the results showed significant positive trends in those parameters over the east, the northwest and a small area in the south of the region. In order to study changes in HW characteristics (duration, frequency and intensity) considering different subperiods, a stochastic model was used to generate 1000 time series equivalent to the observed ones. The results showed that there were no significant changes in HW duration in the last 10-year subperiod in comparison with the first. But, the results were different for warm events (WE), defined with a lower threshold (the 75th percentile), which are also important for agriculture. For several sites, there were significant changes in WE duration, frequency and intensity.