| ABSTRACT | The Danube River Basin is the second longest river basin in Europe and the only river in the world receiving water from 18 countries and flowing through 10 countries. In recent few decades, the frequency and intensity of extreme daily rainfall have increased, and significant floods events occurred more frequently. These extreme precipitation events resulted in human causalities, economic losses, soil water availability, high water flows and other accompanying disasters. The periods of consecutive rainy days accompanied with huge amount of precipitation are in many cases the cause of the floods. The purpose of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Mediterranean Sea to extreme precipitation events registered over the Danube River basin during 1980-2015.
Following a ranking method developed by Ramos et al. (2014; 2017) and using the daily high resolution (0.05º) Climate Hazards Group Infra-Red Precipitation with Station data dataset (CHIRPS, Funk (2015)) , we have made a ranking of the extreme events of precipitation (wet-spells) with different durations (1, 3, 5, 7 and 10 days) over the Danube River Basin, that was used in Ciric et al (2017) to analyzed the sources of moisture and synoptic situation for the most intense event. The aim of the present study is to analyzed the contribution from the Mediterranean Sea to the most intense wet-spells over the basin. So, we selected the 100 first cases in the ranking for all durations. From the outputs of the Lagrangian dispersion model FLEXPART V9.0 global running (and ERA-Interim dataset to run it) we followed forward all the particles that reside over the Mediterranean Sea and reach the Danube River basin. In this way we compute the moisture that generates precipitation over the basin coming from the Mediterranean Sea as (E-P) < 0 (herein, Pflex) for each event at different duration. Comparing these Pflex with CHIRPS precipitation data for each event, the percentage of total precipitation due to the moisture coming from the Mediterranean were calculated. The same analysis was done for the anomalies of Pflex and CHIRP precipitation. |