scholarly journals Dry Spells and Extreme Precipitation are The Main Trigger of Landslides in Central Europe

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Radek Tichavský ◽  
Juan Antonio Ballesteros-Cánovas ◽  
Karel Šilhán ◽  
Radim Tolasz ◽  
Markus Stoffel

Abstract Landslides are frequently triggered by extreme meteorological events which has led to concern and debate about their activity in a future greenhouse climate. It is also hypothesized that dry spells preceding triggering rainfall may increase slope predisposition to sliding, especially in the case of clay-rich soils. Here we combined dendrogeomorphic time series of landslides and climatic records to test the possible role of dry spells and extreme downpours on process activity in the Outer Western Carpathians (Central Europe). To this end, we tested time series of past frequencies and return periods of landslide reactivations at the regional scale with a Generalized Linear Mixed (GLM) model to explore linkages between landslide occurrences and triggering climate variables. Results show that landslide reactivations are concentrated during years in which spring and summer precipitation sums were significantly higher than usual, and that triggering mechanisms vary between different types of landslides (i.e. complex, shallow or flow-like). The GLM model also points to the susceptibility of landslide bodies to the combined occurrence of long, dry spells followed by large precipitation. Such situations are likely to increase in frequency in the future as climate models predict an enhancement of heatwaves and dry spells in future summers, that would be interrupted by less frequent, yet more intense storms, especially also in mountain regions.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha M. Vogel ◽  
Jakob Zscheischler ◽  
Sonia I. Seneviratne

Abstract. The frequency and intensity of climate extremes is expected to increase in many regions due to anthropogenic climate change. In Central Europe extreme temperatures are projected to change more strongly than global mean temperatures and soil moisture-temperature feedbacks significantly contribute to this regional amplification. Because of their strong societal, ecological and economic impacts, robust projections of temperature extremes are needed. Unfortunately, in current model projections, temperature extremes in Central Europe are prone to large uncertainties. In order to understand and potentially reduce uncertainties of extreme temperatures projections in Europe, we analyze global climate models from the CMIP5 ensemble for the business-as-usual high-emission scenario (RCP8.5). We find a divergent behavior in long-term projections of summer precipitation until the end of the 21st century, resulting in a trimodal distribution of precipitation (wet, dry and very dry). All model groups show distinct characteristics for summer latent heat flux, top soil moisture, and temperatures on the hottest day of the year (TXx), whereas for net radiation and large-scale circulation no clear trimodal behavior is detectable. This suggests that different land-atmosphere coupling strengths may be able to explain the uncertainties in temperature extremes. Constraining the full model ensemble with observed present-day correlations between summer precipitation and TXx excludes most of the very dry and dry models. In particular, the very dry models tend to overestimate the negative coupling between precipitation and TXx, resulting in a too strong warming. This is particularly relevant for global warming levels above 2 °C. The analysis allows for the first time to substantially reduce uncertainties in the projected changes of TXx in global climate models. Our results suggest that long-term temperature changes in TXx in Central Europe are about 20 % lower than projected by the multi-model median of the full ensemble. In addition, mean summer precipitation is found to be more likely to stay close to present-day levels. These results are highly relevant for improving estimates of regional climate-change impacts including heat stress, water supply and crop failure for Central Europe.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittal Hari ◽  
Oldrich Rakovec ◽  
Martin Hanel ◽  
Yannis Markonis ◽  
Rohini Kumar

<p>The damages caused by climate extremes to socio-economy and environment is unprecedented during the recent decades, and it causes even more damage when the climate extremes occur in consecutive years. Since the starting of this Century, Europe has witnessed a series of extreme droughts (2003, 2010, 2015, 2018-19) with substantial socioeconomic and ecological losses. This study, with the help of long term data inventory starting from 1766-present, evaluates the occurrence of consecutive two-year droughts using Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standard Precipitation-Evaporation Index (SPEI) during the vegetation period. Although, the 2018 drought is reported in many of the recent studies, 2019 also suffered a huge rainfall deficit together with rising atmospheric temperature. This indicates an increasing evapotranspiration rates, which may intensify the existing drought conditions that originally developed from rainfall deficits. These effects are further noticed in terms of widespread reduction in the overall vegetative development during 2018-2019.</p><p>Considering this impact, we evaluate 2018-19 droughts in terms of both SPI and SPEI and compare its extent with the extreme hot drought of 2003 to place these ongoing droughts within a climatological context. The average severity of the combined two-year drought event (2018-19) is comparable to that of the 2003 drought. However, for the 2003 event, the drought recovered during the proceeding year, which was not the case for the year 2018-19, which is evident from decline in vegetation development dynamics. Furthermore, the analysis with consecutive droughts during 2018-19 in Central Europe shows that it is a very rare event with a return period of over 200 years; and therefore can be considered as one of the most severe droughts in Europe since 1766. </p><p>Using a suite of climate model simulations from CMIP-5 (N=12), we detected an important and potential role of human-induced climate change in increasing the risk of occurrence of the consecutive droughts over central Europe. Here, with the implementation of the fraction of attributable risk (FAR), we show the signifying role of human influence (or anthropogenic forcing) in modulating the consecutive year droughts. Furthermore, these events in the future projection of climate models suggest an increasing frequency in the latter part of 21st century.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1107-1125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha M. Vogel ◽  
Jakob Zscheischler ◽  
Sonia I. Seneviratne

Abstract. The frequency and intensity of climate extremes is expected to increase in many regions due to anthropogenic climate change. In central Europe extreme temperatures are projected to change more strongly than global mean temperatures, and soil moisture–temperature feedbacks significantly contribute to this regional amplification. Because of their strong societal, ecological and economic impacts, robust projections of temperature extremes are needed. Unfortunately, in current model projections, temperature extremes in central Europe are prone to large uncertainties. In order to understand and potentially reduce the uncertainties of extreme temperature projections in Europe, we analyze global climate models from the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5) ensemble for the business-as-usual high-emission scenario (RCP8.5). We find a divergent behavior in long-term projections of summer precipitation until the end of the 21st century, resulting in a trimodal distribution of precipitation (wet, dry and very dry). All model groups show distinct characteristics for the summer latent heat flux, top soil moisture and temperatures on the hottest day of the year (TXx), whereas for net radiation and large-scale circulation no clear trimodal behavior is detectable. This suggests that different land–atmosphere coupling strengths may be able to explain the uncertainties in temperature extremes. Constraining the full model ensemble with observed present-day correlations between summer precipitation and TXx excludes most of the very dry and dry models. In particular, the very dry models tend to overestimate the negative coupling between precipitation and TXx, resulting in a warming that is too strong. This is particularly relevant for global warming levels above 2 ∘C. For the first time, this analysis allows for the substantial reduction of uncertainties in the projected changes of TXx in global climate models. Our results suggest that long-term temperature changes in TXx in central Europe are about 20 % lower than those projected by the multi-model median of the full ensemble. In addition, mean summer precipitation is found to be more likely to stay close to present-day levels. These results are highly relevant for improving estimates of regional climate-change impacts including heat stress, water supply and crop failure for central Europe.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Brázdil ◽  
Petr Dobrovolný ◽  
Andrea Kiss ◽  
Piotr Oliński ◽  
Ladislava Řezníčková

<p>The summers of 1531<strong>–</strong>1540 in the Czech Lands were, according to three drought indices (SPI, SPEI, Z-index) reconstructed from the Czech documentary evidence and instrumental records (Brázdil et al., Clim. Res., 2016), the driest decade during the past five centuries. Based on documentary data, dry patterns of different intensity (represented e.g. by dry spells, low number of precipitation days, drying rivers and lack of water sources, frequent fires) for central Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary) were well expressed for summers in 1532, 1534–1536, 1538 and particularly in 1540. Summer droughts derived from documentary data in central Europe were confronted with gridded summer precipitation totals reconstructed from instrumental, documentary and selected natural proxies (Pauling et al., Clim. Dyn., 2006) and further with summer scPDSI reconstructed from tree-ring widths in the Old World Drought Atlas – OWDA (Cook et al., Sci. Adv., 2015). While in precipitation reconstruction summers of 1531–1540 represented the driest decade of the past 500 years in central Europe, according to scPDSI from OWDA it was the ninth driest decade, despite quite important spatial differences in the occurrence of drier and wetter areas between both reconstructions. From the analysis it follows that particularly the summers of 1534, 1536, 1538 and 1540 were dry not only in central Europe, but also over greater parts of western Europe.</p>


Author(s):  
Sanne B. Geeraerts ◽  
Joyce Endendijk ◽  
Kirby Deater-Deckard ◽  
Jorg Huijding ◽  
Marike H. F. Deutz ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S356) ◽  
pp. 170-170
Author(s):  
Jari Kotilainen

AbstractWe present first results from our study of the host galaxies and environments of quasars in Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA), a multiwavelength photometric and spectroscopic survey for ∼300,000 galaxies over ∼300 deg2, to a limiting magnitude of r ∼ 20 mag. We use a GAIA-selected sample of ∼350 quasars at z < 0.3 in GAMA. For all the quasars, we determine all surrounding GAMA galaxies and measure their star formation (SF) rate and SF history, and the host galaxy morphology and group membership of the quasars. As a comparison sample of inactive galaxies, we use 1000 subsets of galaxies in GAMA, matched in redshift and galaxy stellar mass to the quasars. We find that quasar activity does not depend on the large-scale environment (cluster/group/void), although quasars tend to prefer satellite location in their environment. Compared to inactive galaxies, quasars are preferentially hosted in bulge-dominated galaxies and have higher SF rates, both overall and averaged over the last 10 and 100 Myr. Quasars also have shorter median SF timescales, shorter median time since the last SF burst, and higher metallicity than inactive galaxies. We discuss these results in terms of triggering mechanisms of the quasar activity and the role of quasars in galaxy evolution.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 513
Author(s):  
Olga Fullana ◽  
Mariano González ◽  
David Toscano

In this paper, we test whether the short-run econometric conditions for the basic assumptions of the Ohlson valuation model hold, and then we relate these results with the fulfillment of the short-run econometric conditions for this model to be effective. Better future modeling motivated us to analyze to what extent the assumptions involved in this seminal model are not good enough approximations to solve the firm valuation problem, causing poor model performance. The model is based on the well-known dividend discount model and the residual income valuation model, and it adds a linear information model, which is a time series model by nature. Therefore, we adopt the time series approach. In the presence of non-stationary variables, we focus our research on US-listed firms for which more than forty years of data with the required cointegration properties to use error correction models are available. The results show that the clean surplus relation assumption has no impact on model performance, while the unbiased accounting property assumption has an important effect on it. The results also emphasize the uselessness of forcing valuation models to match the value displacement property of dividends.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (14) ◽  
pp. 1679
Author(s):  
Jacopo Giacomelli ◽  
Luca Passalacqua

The CreditRisk+ model is one of the industry standards for the valuation of default risk in credit loans portfolios. The calibration of CreditRisk+ requires, inter alia, the specification of the parameters describing the structure of dependence among default events. This work addresses the calibration of these parameters. In particular, we study the dependence of the calibration procedure on the sampling period of the default rate time series, that might be different from the time horizon onto which the model is used for forecasting, as it is often the case in real life applications. The case of autocorrelated time series and the role of the statistical error as a function of the time series period are also discussed. The findings of the proposed calibration technique are illustrated with the support of an application to real data.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Charles ◽  
Matthias Eckardt ◽  
Basel Karo ◽  
Walter Haas ◽  
Stefan Kröger

Abstract Background Seasonality in tuberculosis (TB) has been found in different parts of the world, showing a peak in spring/summer and a trough in autumn/winter. The evidence is less clear which factors drive seasonality. It was our aim to identify and evaluate seasonality in the notifications of TB in Germany, additionally investigating the possible variance of seasonality by disease site, sex and age group. Methods We conducted an integer-valued time series analysis using national surveillance data. We analysed the reported monthly numbers of started treatments between 2004 and 2014 for all notified TB cases and stratified by disease site, sex and age group. Results We detected seasonality in the extra-pulmonary TB cases (N = 11,219), with peaks in late spring/summer and troughs in fall/winter. For all TB notifications together (N = 51,090) and for pulmonary TB only (N = 39,714) we did not find a distinct seasonality. Additional stratified analyses did not reveal any clear differences between age groups, the sexes, or between active and passive case finding. Conclusion We found seasonality in extra-pulmonary TB only, indicating that seasonality of disease onset might be specific to the disease site. This could point towards differences in disease progression between the different clinical disease manifestations. Sex appears not to be an important driver of seasonality, whereas the role of age remains unclear as this could not be sufficiently investigated.


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