Erich Fischer

PhD Student

Office UZI 25 J86
Phone +41 1 635 51 98


Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH
Winterthurerstrasse 190
CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland

Volcanic eruptions are an important natural cause of climate variations. The climate response to explosive volcanic eruptions has been studied extensively on a hemispherical and global scale within the instrumental period. A new compilation of 500 year spatio-temporal highly resolved reconstructions, recently developed for Europe, offers extended insight into the impact of major volcanic eruptions on a continental scale. The reconstructions include temperature and precipitation fields over the European land areas as well as sea level pressure and 500 hPa geopotential height fields over the North Atlantic / European region. These reconstructed fields are used to precisely investigate the seasonal climate response to major volcanic eruptions on a regional scale.

The results reveal a large potential of the composite analysis of climate reconstructions to identify the volcanic eects on climate. Combined with model simulations the method would provide optimal skills for an integrated understanding of volcanic eects on climate at the continental scale.

Figure 1: Composite European land surface temperature anomaly field (°C, shaded) of the second summer following sixteen selected major volcanic eruptions during the period 1500—1998. The green contours mark the statistical significance as p-values of the Mann-Whitney Test (from Fischer et al. 2003).

Figure 2: Composite European land surface temperature anomaly field (°C, shaded) of the second winter following sixteen selected major volcanic eruptions during the period 1500—1998. The green contours mark the statistical significance as p-values of the Mann-Whitney Test (from Fischer et al. 2003).


Figure 2.1: Schematic diagram of volcanic inputs to the atmosphere and their effects (as proposed by Robock 2000 and McCormick et al. 1995).

12 May 2004