Slowly but steadily, a stormier Europe

One anticipated consequence of global warming is a rise in the strength and frequency of wind storms striking Europe, bringing about associated increases in property damage, choppy seas, and coastal flooding. Previous research, mostly based on long‐term pressure observations, has sought, to no avail, the signal of a persistent increase in European storms. Using the 20th Century Reanalysis, a recently developed atmospheric reconstruction stretching back to 1871, Donat et al. identified a significant increase in both the strength and frequency of wintertime storms for large parts of Europe. For six regions spread across Europe the authors calculated two different measures of storminess: the magnitude of extreme wind speeds and the frequency of storm events. They found a distinct increase in wind storm activity since the late nineteenth century. The authors also found that regional increases in storm frequencies and extreme wind speeds showed a gradient across Europe, with the largest increases in the northwest, near western Norway, decreasing toward the edge of the study area in central Germany. They found an average increase in storm frequency of between 0.1 and 0.5 storm day per year per decade for the different regions, corresponding to 1.4–6.8 additional storm days per year over the course of the study period, which they suggest could be attributed to global warming or natural variability. ( Geophysical Research Letters , doi:10.1029/2011GL047995, 2011)