Impact of climate change on wintertime European atmospheric blocking

Abstract

Abstract. We study the impact of climate change on wintertime atmospheric blocking over Europe focusing on the frequency, duration, and extension of blocking events. These events are identified via the weather type decomposition (WTD) methodology applied on the output of climate models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6). Historical simulations as well as two future scenarios, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5, are considered. The models are evaluated against the reanalysis and only a subset of climate models, which better represent the blocking weather regime in the recent-past climate, is considered for the analysis. We find that frequency and duration of blocking events remain relatively stationary over the 21st century. In order to quantify the extension of blocking events, we define a new methodology which relies on the WTD to identify blocking events. We show that the results are in agreement with previous studies that define blocking events with blocking indexes. We find that blocking extension will increase, especially in the worst-case scenario, due to a pressure increase driven by a thermodynamical warming during blocking events rather than atmospheric circulation changes.