Convective indices trends in Cyprus

<p>Recent studies have shown that the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East are regions strongly affected by climate change, with a rate of warming two times faster than the global average. While climate change comes with major implications, including the fact that severe storms will become more virulent and more often, studies showed that the annual number of cyclones in the Mediterranean region tends to remain constant in the near future, with no visible trend.</p> <p>In this paper, we are studying the trends for convective indices in the region of Cyprus, with modelled, and also observational data. For the modelled data, we are using the CORDEX dataset for convective potential energy and convective inhibition with 3h temporal resolution, for the historical period (1971 - 2000), and for the near future (2021 - 2050), from which we extracted the daily maximum and mean values.</p> <p>Observational data is used from the ESWD database, reports on tornadoes, hail and heavy rain, together with radiosonde data from Athalassa station (radiosonde available in high-resolution mode from 2016, with two launches per day, at 05:00 and 11:00 UTC). Using the Python packages SHARPpy and MetPy we computed the convective indices from radiosounding data.</p> <p>It is estimated that two tornadoes and three waterspouts occur each year in Cyprus, and in a study from 2006 describing two tornadoes outbreaks from January 2003 and January 2004, these events had CAPE index 411 J/kg and 210 J/kg, and respectively lifted index of -2 and  0.</p> <p>The authors acknowledge the ‘EXCELSIOR’: ERATOSTHENES: EΧcellence Research Centre for Earth Surveillance and Space-Based Monitoring of the Environment H2020 Widespread Teaming project (www.excelsior2020.eu). The ‘EXCELSIOR’ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 857510, from the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for the European Programmes, Coordination and Development and the Cyprus University of Technology.</p>