“In my article, On the return period of the 2003 heat wave, the sentence “summer of2003 was by far the hottest summer since 1500” is wrongly attributed to ‘Luterbacher et al. (2003)’. My probable intent was to cite Casty et al. (2005) which actually states “the years 1994, 2000, 2002 and particularly 2003 were the warmest since 1500”. Note that a similar statement can also be found in Stott et al. (2004), “The summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at latest ad 1500”.
Regarding the statement (in reference to Luterbacher et al., which was actually published in 2004) that “their estimate of the return period of that event is 250 years”, the attribution again is incorrect. Such an estimate can be found in Brown et al. (2005), “best estimate of a 1 in 250 year event” or Lowe et al. (2004) “the same event is likely to occur much more frequently; most likely, once every 250 years”, among others.
I regret these inappropriate attributions and inadequate referencing.“
Brown S, Stott P, Clark R, Temperature Extremes (2011) the Past and the Future. Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research Working Paper. [online http://stabilisation.metoffice.com/…]
Casty C, Wanner H, Luterbacher J, Esper J, Böhm R (2005) Temperature and precipitation variability in the European Alps since 1500. Int J Climatol 25(14):1855–1880, 30 November 2005 CrossRef
Lowe J, Smith F, Jenkins G, Pope V (2004) Uncertainty, risk and dangerous climate change. Hadley Centre [online http://cedadocs.badc.rl.ac.uk/247/
Luterbacher J, Dietrich D, Xoplaki E, Grosjean M, Wanner H (2004) European seasonal and annual temperature variability, trends, and extremes since 1500. Science 303:1499–1503 CrossRef
Stott PA, Stone DA, Allen MR (2004) Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature 432:610–614 (2 December 2004) CrossRef
The paper on “on the return period of the 2003 heat wave” has been published online here, before Christmas. It should be published soon by Climatic Change, http://link.springer.com/article/...
“Extremal events are difficult to model since it is difficult to characterize formally those events. The 2003 heat wave in Europe was not characterized by very high temperatures, but mainly the fact that night temperature were no cool enough for a long period of time. Hence, simulation of several models (either with heavy tailed noise or long range dependence) yield different estimations for the return period of that extremal event.“
To go further on the impact on mortality (which was not the aim of the paper), there is a paper in Nature (here).
The paper on the 2003 heat wave has been submitted a few months ago, and now, the preprint can be downloaded (here for the preprint version, or here on Hal). The paper has a long story, that I will probably summarize here, some day…
“Extremal events are difficult to model since it is difficult to characterize formally those events. The 2003 heat wave in Europe was not characterized by very high temperatures, but mainly the fact that night temperature were no cool enough for a long period of time. Hence, simulation of several models (either with heavy tailed noise or long range dependence) yielddifferent estimations for the return period of that extremal event. “
The paper has been presented in several conferences, in started a couple of days after the birth of Romane, in March 2005, in talks on dependencies in environmental series….
In February 2005, opening the conference on Climate change: a global, national
and regional challenge, chairman Dennis Tirpak pointed out that there is no longer any doubt that the Earth’s climate is changing […] globally, nine of the past 10 years have been the warmest since records began in 1861“. He
singled out the heatwave that gripped western Europe in 2003 as an example:
Europe’s worst natural disaster in 50 years killed as many as 40; 000 people
and inflicted an estimated 30 billion dollars in damage. Hence, the summer of
2003 will be remembered for the extreme heat, and the approximately 40,000
heat-related deaths over western Europe (from 30,000 up to more than 52,000
depending on the source). More specifically, the period 1-15 August 2003 was
the most intense heat of the summer. The report of Pirard et al. (2005) states
that Europe experienced an unprecedented heat wave in the Summer 2003. In France, it was the warmest summer recorded for 53 years in terms of minimal, maximal and average temperature and in terms of duration” […]
"sendo l'intento mio scrivere cosa utile a chi la intende…"
The paper on the 2003 heat wave has been submitted a few months ago, and now, the preprint can be downloaded (
Modeling the 2003 heatwave in Paris (