Mediterranean Climate Variability
The book provides an updated description of climate variability in the Mediterranean basin, focusing on its strong inter-annual to decadal features. The book describes both local physical processes responsible for these variability - such as changes in the surface properties and land use- and globalprocesses - such as changes in the large scale atmospheric circulation associated to global warming, NAO, tropical monsoon and ENSO. Regional climate change issues are also addressed.
Publisher: Elsevier, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Editors: P.Lionello, P.Malanotte-Rizzoli, R.Boscolo
CONTENTS LIST AND LEADING AUTHORS OF CHAPTERS
- The Mediterranean Climate: an overview of the main characteristics and issues, P.Lionello (Univ of Lecce, Italy)
- Mediterranean climate variability over the last centuries: A review, J.Luterbacher (Univ. of Bern, Switzerland)
- Relations between variability in the Mediterranean region and global tropical oceans: ENSO, Indian and African Monsoon, P.Alpert (Tel-Aviv University, Israel)
- Relations between variability in the Mediterranean region and mid-latitude variability, R.Trigo (Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)
- Variability of the Mediterranean Sea Level and oceanic circulation and its relations to large scale climate patterns, M.Tsimplis (National Oceanographic Centre Southampton UK)
- Mediterranean outflow and its link to Climate, V.Artale (ENEA Casaccia, Italy)
- Evaluation of the regional climate variability in connection with weather patterns, P.Lionello (Univ of Lecce, Italy)
- Regional atmosphere-ocean coupled processes and modelling, L. Li (LMD/IPSL/CNRS, Universite’ Paris 6, France)
- The Mediterranean climate change, U.Ulbrich (University of Berlin, Germany) and W.May ( Danish Meteorological Institute, Denmark)
The book aims to present in a coherent and organic way the results of several of these initiatives and give an updated view of the research recently carried out, with emphasis of the analysis at the Mediterranean basin scale and considering global implications. The book is a multi-authored book, where group of scientists, coordinated by a leading author are responsible for each chapter. It is the result of the cooperation among the scientists involved in the MedCLIVAR project and such cooperation is reflected in the integration and cross referencing among chapters, where the characteristics of the Mediterranean Climate, its variability and trends are discussed from different perspectives. The focus is on decadal and centennial time scales and on the results available on the impact of future emission scenarios at regional scale. The physical processes responsible for these variability are both local - such as changes in the surface properties and land use- and global - such as changes in the large scale atmospheric circulation associated to global warming, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), tropical monsoon and El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Some limitation on subjects included has been self-imposed. Though paleo data describing longer time scales and interactions involving ecosystems are obviously interesting and related topics, it was preferred to restrict the scope to the physical component to have a homogeneous set of chapters. Subjects directly related to seasonal climate prediction were not included as it was felt that they were already addressed by other groups of scientists and weather prediction centres.