European climate under +1,5 ° C, +2,0 ° C and +3,0 ° C global warming level

A new paper by GERICS staff member Claas Teichmann and colleagues was published on March 21st 2018 in the scientific open access journal Atmosphere.

The need to restrict global mean temperature to avoid irreversible climate change is supported by scientific evidence. The paper gives a picture of what European climate would look like under +1.5 °C, +2.0 °C and +3.0 °C global warming level (GWL). It is shown that a statistically significant change in the investigated climate indices related to temperature and precipitation extremes can be avoided under +1.5 °C GWL compared to the investigated higher GWLs +2.0 °C and +3.0 °C for the majority of the population in almost all regions.

The study is based on state of the art regional climate information for Europe taken from the European branch of the World Climate Research Program Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (EURO-CORDEX) ensemble.

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