SEASONAL AND NONSTATIONARY NATURE OF EUROPEAN CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

Air temperature and precipitation are key climatic parameters, anomalies of which have a severe impact on the life and activity of mankind. As an example of such anomalies, we refer to the summer of 2002 when prolonged draughts in central European Russia provoked spacious and intense forest fires. A year later, almost all western and central Europe suffered lack of precipitation and extreme high air temperatures, resulting in catastrophic forest fires and an increase in the death rate among inhabitants. Successful prediction of such climatic anomalies will allow us to reduce the damage inflicted by them. In recent years, increasingly greater attention has been given to study of seasonality in climatic variations of different scales and long-period variability in characteristics of seasonal cycle [6–9]. Multidirectional variations in different seasons may indicate variations in the continental character of climate, which may appear to be no less an important climatic signal than variations in annual mean values of various parameters.