Seeing the future hot spells
Tapping satellite data to better predict killer heat waves
By Sid Perkins
Satellite observations of soil moisture, combined with regional climate models, could help scientists better predict the size and scope of future heat waves, a new study suggests.
One of the most devastating heat waves in recent years struck Europe in 2003 (SN: 7/3/04, p. 10). Along with an estimated 70,000 heat-related deaths across the continent — many of them in France, the epicenter of the heat wave — droughts before and during the hot spell helped trigger forest fires and crop losses, Richard de Jeu, an environmental scientist at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and his colleagues report online March 4 in the Journal of Geophysical Research–Atmospheres. The combination of high temperature and drought trimmed the continent’s foliage growth, on average, by about 30 percent that year (SN: 10/15/05, p. 254).
Climate models can often predict that a heat wave is coming, but a number of factors, and how they interact, affect the strength and extent of a hot spell in sometimes unpredictable ways — as they did in Europe in 2003.
Trends observed by meteorologists and by Earth-orbiting satellites in the months before the continent’s heat wave struck in earnest could have provided clues that summer temperatures would be abnormally warm, the researchers contend. The analysis focused on the Upper Danube watershed — an area surrounding Munich that is slightly smaller than South Carolina — but the results can be readily applied to larger areas as well, the researchers report.