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Sunny 2018
Many people felt that the year 2018 was quite dry, warm and sunny in many parts of Europe, including Germany. As the CM SAF is now generating and providing the new Interim Climate Data Records (ICDR), which consistently extend corresponding Thematical Climate Data Records (TCDR) into ‘near-real time’, anomalies can now be analyzed with high confidence.
In this respect, the sunshine duration given by the combination of the SARAH-2 (TCDR) plus extension 2016-2017 (currently under review) and the ICDR SEVIRI Radiation, has been analyzed to quantify the anomalous sunshine duration in 2018 in Europe and Germany (until end of August).
Figure 1 provides the broad view of the sunshine duration anomaly for Europe. It showns that large parts of Central and Northern Europe received significantly more sunshine hours than usual. This anomaly commonly reaches 20 to 30 %, and more than 50 % in parts of Great Britain and Scandinavia. On the contrary, Southern Europe was a bit less sunny in 2018.
Figure 1: Sunshine Duration Anomaly 2018 [%] (January to August) relative to the 35-year (1983-2017) climatology Source: CM SAF
Regarding the summer (JJA) in Germany, 2018 sunshine is not exceeding 2003 (see Figure 2), but it is the second most sunny summer for the time period 1983-2018.
Figure 2: Time series of sunshine duration anomalies [%] of the summer seasons (June, July, August) for Germany; Source: CM SAF
By using the CM SAF satellite products, it is also possible to look at the sunshine duration anomaly for Germany with high spatial resolution. Figure 3 shows that, even though the anomaly was positive all over Germany, there are some spatial differences inside Germany. While the anomaly in Southern Germany was moderate, parts of Northern Germany received record sunshine hours.
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Figure 3: Left: Sunshine Duration anomaly [%] 2018 for summer (JJA) in Germany.
Right: Accumulated annual sunshine hours for Germany for the individual years (1983-2018); Black line marks the climatology and red line marks 2018.
While the summer season 2018 is no record year for the sunshine duration, January-August 2018 in Germany set an absolute record year for the time period 1983-2018. Figure 3 (right) shows the accumulated sunshine duration for Germany for the individual years. It can be seen that 2018 is slightly ahead of 2003 for the time period January to August. For Germany, the spread of annual sunshine duration is quite large between the different years. 1987 was extremely dark, while 2003 is the record year (so far). 2018 sunshine is still on track for a new record – CM SAF will keep on monitoring!
UP / Aug2018