Climate monitoring and heat and cold waves detection over France using a new spatialization of daily temperature extremes from 1947 to present

Abstract

For many years real-time climate monitoring for temperature over France has been performed using a national index built by averaging the daily mean temperatures of constant subset of 30 stations with long-term series. In order to derive climate indices at finer scales, a spatialization of extreme daily temperatures (called ANASTASIA) had been produced on a 1 km regular grid using a regression-kriging method. The production covers 1947 to present period. Cross-validation shows low biases after the 1960s. The temporal homogeneity of the product is satisfying at the national scale from the 1970s. However, a high impact of the network density has been found and the use of a too coarse observation network deteriorates the analysis creating temporal heterogeneities. Finally, the ANASTASIA analysis has been used for real-time monitoring over France and detection of heat and cold wave episodes. The new products based on ANASTASIA are consistent with the current operational ones at national scale while bringing added values at local scales.