15 February 2024 | 10:00 – 10:40 CET | Online

Please join us for this Climate Coffee with Emmanuele Russo on Increasing Intensity of Extreme Heatwaves: The Crucial Role of Metrics

Abstract

In weather and climate applications, a wide range of commonly employed heatwave intensity indices relies either on cumulative or averaged values of temperature-based variables. In this study, by comparing four different heatwave intensity indices applied to reanalysis data we show that metrics based on cumulative or averaged values lead to important differences in the detection of the most intense events of the period 1950–2021. This suggests that particular attention is needed when using the two families of metrics for assessing heatwave intensity. Indices based on cumulative values should be preferred over the ones relying on temporal averages, better allowing for the comparison of events of different length. Under these considerations, one of the considered cumulative indices is used for characterizing heatwaves of the period 1950–2021, showing that heatwaves that were unlikely before 1986 have become almost 10 times more frequent and up to three times more intense during recent times.

Russo, E., & Domeisen, D. I. V. (2023). Increasing intensity of extreme heatwaves: The crucial role of metrics. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2023GL103540. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL103540

About Emmanuele

Emmanuele studied physics at the Universita’ degli studi di Catania, in Italy, with a specialisation in atmospheric physics.

He then moved to Germany in 2013, at the Free University of Berlin, where he received his PhD for a thesis on the study of the climate of Europe over the last 6000 years.

He then continued working at the FU Berlin for 2 more years, on 2 different projects: the development of a chemistry scheme for the large-eddy simulation model PALM, and the investigation of past, present, and future climate changes over Central Asia using the regional climate model COSMO-CLM.

In 2018 he moved to Bern, for a postdoc where he contributed to the reconstruction of the alpine glaciers during the last glacial period (~last 100,000 years) using a chain of global and regional models, as well as different statistical methods.

In November 2021 he started a postdoc at the ETH Zurich, working on the development of a hierarchy of climate models of different complexity for the investigation of the drivers of heatwaves.

Currently, he is also the coordinator of the evaluation working group of the CLM-community, where they try to provide optimal model configurations for the performance of climate projections with the regional models COSMO-CLM and ICON-CLM.

His research activities span a wide variety of topics, with climate model development and application being central subjects. Additionally, he is very interested in statistical methods for climate research, particularly concerning the evaluation of climate models and the investigation of extreme events.starting at the Danish Meteorological Institute, my research has shifted towards working with sea and ice surface temperatures.

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