Introduction - European Trend Atlas of Extreme Temperature and Precipitation Records - page 3

Extremes and their Impacts on the natural physical environ-
ment and human systems and ecosystems, as well as manag-
ing the risks from climate extremes at the Local Level round
the world.
Instrumental data sets enabling studies of changes in
extreme climate events in Europe have been collected by
ECA&D (European Climate Assessment and Dataset)
(Klein-Tank et al. 2002b), and by the STARDEX project
(Haylock and Goodess 2004). This atlas represents an ef-
fort within the EMULATE project. The EMULATE project
partly built on the ECA&D data set, but also on European
station data from other projects and data obtained through
direct contacts with several national weather services and
additionally presented a set of newly digitized and col-
lected daily data at many Spanish stations (Moberg et al.
2006). While the analysis in Moberg et al. (2006) focused
on a rather small subset of all the indices (19 out of 64) dur-
ing only the summer and winter seasons within the period
1901-2000, Chen et al. (2006) presented results for all the
64 indices for all seasons and three different time periods.
The focus of this new atlas is on a systematic trend analysis
of a subset of 27 out of the 64 indices that together represent

the most extreme climatic conditions for all seasons and also
climatic mean conditions for comparison. The trends at in-
dividual stations are presented for the periods 1801-2000,
1851-2000, and 1901-2000. Results for the latter period are
also aggregated into three sub-regions of Europe (Northern,
Central, and Southern Europe).
This study is motivated by the need for easy access to
information about changes in the extreme climatic condi-
tions at the European meteorological stations with the lon-
gest daily records. This need is becoming more and more
important as adaptation work in response to climate change
has being implemented in Europe. The report is organized
as follows. Chapter 2 describes the data and method used.
Chapter 3 presents the results of the trend analysis for all the
selected indices, stations and regions in maps and figures.
Some statistics for the stations and regions are developed in
Chapter 4 to summarize these results in tabular form. Finally,
Chapter 5 provides the conclusions that summarize the infor-
mation shown by the tables and figures. The appendix lists
all estimated seasonal trends for all the indices at all stations
as a quick overview.