Enhancing Middle East Climate Change Monitoring and Indexes

Extreme climate events can have significant impacts on both natural and human systems, and therefore it is important to know if and how climate extremes are changing. Analysis of extremes requires long-term daily station data and, unfortunately, there are many regions in the world where these data are not internationally exchanged. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report (Folland et al. 2001) relied heavily on the multinational analysis of Frich et al (2002). However, Frich et al. had no results from all of Central and South America, and most of Africa and southern Asia, including the Middle East. To remedy this situation for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the joint World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology/World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) project on Climate Variability and Predictability (CLIVAR) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection, Monitoring, and Indices (Zwiers et al. 2003) internationally coordinated a series of five regional climate change workshops and a set of indices for analyses of extremes. Two workshops covered the Americas, one in Brazil and one in Guatemala. One workshop addressed southern Africa. A workshop in India involved south and central Asia, while the workshop for the Middle East sought to address the regionmore » from Turkey to Iran and from Georgia to the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The key to a successful workshop is a collaborative approach between outside experts and regional participants. The participants here broght long-term daily precipitation and maximum and minimum temperature data, station history information, an understanding of their country's climate, and a willingness to analyze thse data under the tutelage of outside experts. The outside experts brought knowledge of the crucial data and climate change issues, presentations to explain these issues, and user-friendly software to aid the analyses. Xuebin Zhang of Environment Canada wrote the workshop software to perform quality control (QC) on the data, tst the time series homogeneity, and calculate the indices. The participants created presentations on how extremes were changing in their countries. The workshop is making a direct contribution to climate change research by initiating a peer-review paper on how extremes are changing in a region never before analyzed and where data exchange is rare.« less