Summers and heatwaves in Europe will be even more sweltering than feared. The regional climate models relied on by planners greatly underestimate summer heat because they don’t factor in more intense sunshine due to falling air pollution, a study has shown.
“If models don’t take air pollution changes into account, they will underestimate the intensity of future heatwaves even more than they underestimate mean summer warming,” says Dominik Schumacher at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. “It’s problematic because a lot of European countries strongly rely on these simulations to plan for the future.”
Michael Le Page