Project title: Emerging off-season heat waves in Europe
Registration number: 26-22280S
Provider: Czech Science Foundation
Programme: Standard
Project coordinator: Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the AS CR, v.v.i.
Project partner: Czech University of Life Sciences Prague – Faculty of Environmental Sciences
CZU Principal investigator: doc. RNDr. Jan Kyselý, Ph.D.
Project manager: Ing. Petr Bašta
Project schedule: 01/2026–12/2028
Total project budget: CZK 10,276,000
FES project budget: CZK 4,239,000
Abstract:
The project is motivated by recent occurrences of heat waves far outside their usual season, such as the 2024 early April heat wave in Central Europe. We propose to explore a novel concept of off-season heat waves defined based on two principal criteria: i) temperatures exceed thresholds for a summertime heat wave for several consecutive days and ii) the event falls outside the usual heat wave season. By analysing observed datasets and the ERA5 reanalysis, we will advance understanding of spatiotemporal characteristics of off-season heat waves across Europe, including their vertical structures and mechanisms of their onset, persistence, and termination. In the next step, we will evaluate off-season heat waves in regional climate model simulations to identify models’ abilities to reproduce such events. Because climate change adaptation strategies lack information on future off-season heat waves, we will subsequently combine probabilistic and event-based storylines approaches to deliver comprehensible scenarios of these events for near future and the end of the 21st century.