Authors
Federico Conticello, Francesco Cioffi, Upmanu Lall, Bruno Merz
Publication date
2016/4
Journal
EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts
Pages
EPSC2016-6652
Description
Floods and other hydroclimatic extremes may represent specific states of organization of the atmospheric circulation. Given this hypothesis an open question is how best to identify such states, and their space-time persistence. Such a mapping would facilitate a physically meaningful identification of the potential severity, frequency and duration of such events in future climates. With this in view, the link between large scale atmospheric circulation and the extreme floods in Germany and England is investigated by a combined Kohonen Networks and Complex Networks approach. Historical data from 57 streamflow gages in England and 68 in Germany and the Reanalysis Historical Data of the Atmospheric Circulation Fields, bounded from 90W to 70E and from 20N to 80N, are used for the purpose. The common period of record is from 1960 to 2012. A finite number of typical atmospheric configurations of the …