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How warmer and drier will the Mediterranean region be at the end of the twenty-first century?

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Abstract

Nearly all regions in the world are projected to become dryer in a warming climate. Here, we investigate the Mediterranean region, often referred to as a climate change “hot spot”. From regional climate simulations, it is shown that although enhanced warming and drying over land is projected, the spatial pattern displays high variability. Indeed, drying is largely caused by enhanced warming over land. However, in Northern Europe, soil moisture alleviates warming induced drying by up to 50% due to humidity uptake from land. In already arid regions, the Mediterranean Sea is generally the only humidity source, and drying is only due to land warming. However, over Sahara and the Iberian Peninsula, enhanced warming over land is insufficient to explain the extreme drying. These regions are also isolated from humidity advection by heat lows, which are cyclonic circulation anomalies associated with surface heating over land. The cyclonic circulation scales with the temperature gradient between land and ocean which increases with climate change, reinforcing the cyclonic circulation over Sahara and the Iberian Peninsula, both diverting the zonal advection of humidity to the south of the Iberian Peninsula. The dynamics are therefore key in the warming and drying of the Mediterranean region, with extreme aridification over the Sahara and Iberian Peninsula. In these regions, the risk for human health due to the thermal load which accounts for air temperature and humidity is therefore projected to increase significantly with climate change at a level of extreme danger.

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Acknowledgements

This work is a contribution to the HyMeX program (HYdrological cycle in The Mediterranean EXperiment) through INSU-MISTRALS support and the MED-CORDEX program (COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment - Mediterranean region). It is also a contribution to the cross-cutting activity on sub-daily precipitation of the GEWEX program of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) (GEWEX Hydroclimate Panel).

Funding

This study is supported by the IPSL group for regional climate and environmental studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LMD/IPSL, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, ENS, PSL Research University, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Palaiseau, France

    Philippe Drobinski, Nicolas Da Silva, Sylvain Mailler & Caroline Muller

  2. LATMOS/IPSL, UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Guyancourt, France

    Sophie Bastin

  3. Institute for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Bodo Ahrens

  4. Danish Meteorological Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Ole B. Christensen

  5. CMCC, Lecce, Italy

    Piero Lionello

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  1. Philippe Drobinski
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  2. Nicolas Da Silva
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  3. Sophie Bastin
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Correspondence to Philippe Drobinski.

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Drobinski, P., Da Silva, N., Bastin, S. et al. How warmer and drier will the Mediterranean region be at the end of the twenty-first century?. Reg Environ Change 20, 78 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-020-01659-w

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