Changes in the extreme climatological events in the MENA region

Abstract

Extreme weather events have been receiving increased attention because they provide striking examples of the changing climate. The last four years (2015-2018) have been the warmest years recorded. Temperature and precipitation records are being broken every year while the intensity, duration, and frequency of heatwaves, floods, and droughts are increasing. Decision-makers require every bit of information to be able to take the correct course of action. As a result, efforts of gathering high quality data for useful and accurate analysis and predictions have increased in the scientific community. We aim to document the frequency increase in extreme precipitation in the Middle East and North Africa and Turkey by fitting the gridded 3 hourly precipitation data generated by MPI and HadGEM general circulation models and ICTP’s RegCM 4.4 to the exponential function, thus extracting the return period and intensity of extreme precipitation events. Results show a decrease in the return periods of 100 year events in 2010-2040, 2040-2070, and 2070-2100 with respect to 1970-2000.