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The methodological framework of a large-scale risk assessment for Austrian forests under scenarios of climatic change is presented. A recently developed 3D-patch model is initialized with ground-true soil and vegetation data from sample plots of the Austrian Forest Inventory (AFI). Temperature and precipitation data of the current climate are interpolated from a network of more than 600 weather stations to the sample plots of the AFI. Vegetation development is simulated under current climate (âcontrol runâ) and under climate change scenarios starting from today's forest composition and structure. Similarity of species composition and accumulated biomass between these two runs at various points in time were used as assessment criteria. An additive preference function which is based on Saatyâs AHP is employed to synthesize these criteria to an overall index of the adaptation potential of current forests to a changing climate. The presented methodology is demonstrated for a small sample from the Austrian Forest Inventory. The forest model successfully simulated equilibrium species composition under current climatic conditions spatially explicit in a heterogenous landscape based on ground-true data. At none of the simulated sites an abrupt forest dieback did occur due to climate change impacts. However, substantial changes occured with regard to species composition of the potential natural vegetation (PNV).

In the face of climate change, the assessment of land transport infrastructure exposure towards adverse climate events is of major importance for Europe's economic prosperity and social wellbeing. Robust and reliable information on the extent of climate change and its projected future impacts on roads and railways are of prime importance for proactive planning and the implementation of targeted adaptation strategies. Among various menacing natural hazards, landslides stand out as most destructive hazards to the functional effectivity and structural integrity of land-bound transport systems, since they cause long-lasting downtimes and exceedingly expensive repair works. Periods of heavy precipitation persisting over several days are known to be a major trigger for increased landslide activity. Along with climate change such events can be expected to increase in frequency, duration and intensity over the decades to come. In this study, a Climate Index (CI) picturing rainfall patterns which trigger landslides in Central Europe is analyzed until the end of this century and compared to present day conditions. The analysis of potential future developments is based on an ensemble of dynamically downscaled climate projections which are driven by the SRES A1B socio-economic scenario. Resulting regional scale climate change projections across Central Europe are concatenated with Europe's road and railway network. Results indicate overall increases of landslide occurrences. While flat terrain at low altitudes exhibits increases of about two more landslide events per year until the end of this century, higher elevated regions are more affected and show increases of up to eight additional events. This general spatial distribution emerges already in the near future (2021-2050) but gets more pronounced in the remote future (2071-2100). Largest increases are to be found in the Alsace. Consequently, potential impacts of increasing landslide events are discussed using the example of a case study covering the Black Forest mountain range in Baden-Württemberg by further enriching the climate information with and additional geodata. Derived findings are suitable to support political decision-makers and European authorities in transport, freight and logistics by offering detailed information on which parts of Europe's land-bound transport network are at particularly high risk concerning landslide activity. This study supports proactive development of adaption strategies and the realization of cost-efficient and effective protection programmes as well as the generation of guidelines for climate proofing. This refers to the design of transport networks, intermodal logistics as well as the setting up of maintenance and reinforcement strategies in order to safeguard one of the most essential backbones of Europe's economic prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important consequence of climate change is the impact on phenological spring timing events. Although it is generally understood that anthropogenic mechanisms play a major role in the warming trend of the climate and that the timing of phenological phases depends largely on the temperature, the link has yet to be quantitatively shown for different kind of areas. In this study the goal is to show this for a Central European region. In order to do this a multistep attribution to external forcings is carried out, linking the earlier timing of phenological spring events to changed climate conditions (increasing temperature) and this change in the environment to external (anthropogenic) forcing.The goal is to apply the ‚optimal fingerprint' technique to detect and attribute anthropogenic causes to the earlier timing of phenological events (Hasselmann, 1997). In order to achieve this, one has to use data from different models. First, to assess the variability of the climate without any kind of forcing (neither natural, nor anthropogenic), pre-industrial control (piControl) simulations from Global Circulation Models (GCMs) are needed. Second, one needs different historical GCM runs, some forced by natural forcings only and others with anthropogenic forcing included. To be able to compare the large Scale Information from the GCMs with the local scale information in the form of phenological observations, an empirical-statistical downscaling model is used, to overcome the scale differences. Afterwards, a phenological model is fed with the downscaled temperature data to obtain distinctly forced, simulated phenological data.The study is successful if and only if a discrepancy between naturally forced climate conditions and observations is found, so that the estimated statistical significance level of the detection of a net climate change satisfies the requirements (rejection of the null hypothesis that the change can be explained by natural variability only or naturally forced climate conditions). And if it can only be explained when factoring in anthropogenic forcings, meaning the observations are only consistent when incorporating them. This attribution part in using the aforementioned technique is a consistency check and yields confidence values to quantitatively assess the anthropogenic impact.HASSELMANN, Klaus. Multi-pattern fingerprint method for detection and attribution of climate change. Climate Dynamics, 1997, 13. Jg., Nr. 9, S. 601-611. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contents of this contribution sketch the derivation of this procedure and its successful application to the (so-far) largest and most complex civil-protection project implemented in Austria after WWII. Results, rely largely on three master theses carried out within a cooperation of the Climate Impact Team (CIT) at ZAMG, the BMNT and the Institute of Meteorology and Geophysics at the University of Vienna. Apart therefrom findings profit greatly from a close cooperation of CIT and the European Freight and Logistics Leaders' Forum (F&L). The goal is to support decision makers in designing and implementing efficient and sustainable protection against changing threats. This necessitates extensive preparatory work: (i) the generation of ensembles comprising regional-scale climate-change scenarios until 2100, driven by different pathways of mankind (RCPs: 2.6, 4.5 and 8.5, RCPs - Representative Concentration Pathways); (ii) facilitated under the umbrella of the BMNT: first-time integration of the three most comprehensive national cadasters of extreme-weather induced hazard-events; the outstanding scope and quality of these cadasters enable the compilation of the so-called 'event space', which is now Austria's most extensive database of weather driven hazard-processes (well above 20.000 records from 1948 onwards); this wealth of observations (we focus here on landslides and floodings) allows for (iii) in depth analyses (von Storch and Zwiers, 1999) of linkages between extreme weather and potential damage events, distinguishing at the same time (iv) amongst process-categories as well as sub-regions within Austria's share of the European Alps: 'Alpine Territory', 'Northern Lowlands' and the 'Southern Basin Chain'; blending (v) the 'event space' with spatial high-resolved, daily observations of precipitation totals and temperature values (SPARTACUS, Hiebl and Frei 2015, 2017) sets the frame required for the (vi) identification-procedure of region- and category-sensitive weather sequences triggering potential damage-events (so-called Climate Indices, CIs); step (vii) derives future CIs occurrences from previously downgescaled ensembles within 'near' (2036-2065) and 'remote' periods (2071-2100) and assesses results in terms of current levels; sustainable protection structures must withstand these 'near' (and 'remote') threat levels;Step (viii) finally demonstrates the successful application of the procedure calibrated by the expertise of our partners in charge of public protection protection, to Austria's (so far) largest project in public protection since WWII, in which methods currently available have not provided guidance. Presently BMNT surveys adjustments required for the integration of the procedure. Aside therefrom, its application to critical transport infrastructure is in discussion with the Forum of European Freight and Logistics Leaders (F\&L), because members are experiencing rises of supply-chain disruptions due to climate-change driven hazard events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme events, such as heat waves and floodings, constitute major challenges for all organizations and institutions responsible for protection, support and medical assistance of civilians. Therefore the ongoing enhancement of alert and warning systems is highly desirable. In particular the investigation of climate change driven effects on extreme events will help agencies to plan their medium to long term resources. We thus investigate the relationship between large scale synoptic weather patterns and extreme events on the regional scale in Austria and thereby focus on studying how the frequency, duration and intensity of weather patterns change under global warming by performing nonstationary regression. Furthermore the impact of these trends in the large scale weather patterns on extreme precipitation and temperature events in Austria is analyzed. Achieved results shall significantly support disaster protection and relief organizations' anticipatory medium to long term planning of resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to allow anticipatory planning achieving statistically robust strategies, all necessary calculations involvedin setting them up have to draw on well occupied ensembles of losc projections. If, aside from that, such ensemblesare also available for different pathways of mankind, resulting strategies are not only statistically robust but referon top of that to corridors, which jointly encompass sufficient parts of potential future developments (e.g. of futurethreat-occurrences).Both features enhance the validity and significance of in such way established strategies, which are - in case of civil protection and the defense of critical infrastructure against damaging events - evidently worth striving for. Therefore, the goal we present here is the generation of - statistically as well as in terms of mankind's evolution - robust ensembles in the European Alps, where they are much required.This goal is achieved by an ESD technique termed Analog Method, which rests on capturing synoptic dynamics and the grading of similarity between observed and projected patterns ('analogs') whereby physically consistent losc weather conditions are assigned to GCM patterns. In order to ensure optimal quality of the derived ensembles as well as coherence amongst weather conditions in all considered losc regions, we have to solve two optimization problems. One of these refers to the dimensions of the atmospheric window used for analog-detection and is a problem under two boundary conditions imposed by von Storch et al. (1993) and van den Dool (1994). The first pertains to GCMs' skillful scale and, hence, sets an infimum to the space dimensions to be considered, whilst the latter claim corresponds to a supremum stating it's outstandingly unlikely to identify proper analogs at high dimensions.The other optimization problem is associated with the determination of the most suitable geographical position within a large sector over the North Atlantic, the continent and the Mediterranean, on which the atmospheric window best has to be centered. Findings are presented, discussed and put into context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All over the world, an increasing number of weather-induced damage events can be observed. They are due to enhanced frequencies and intensities of previously scarce weather patterns. This development raises consciousness among federal officials and industry executives responsible for public protection as it increases the risk of casualties and losses to society, ecosystems, socio-economics, infrastructure and therefore poses the question of how the actual level of protection can be sustained in the decades to come. This study investigates the use of decision theory techniques to support decision-making processes actually used by the authorities responsible for civil protection. In order to accomplish these tasks, we apply the Bernoulli Principle in conjunction with a set of rules to a very comprehensive and complex case study in which the standard decision-making procedures of the authorities have not yielded a clear result. By employing protection-strategies used by the authorities (retention strategies, linear as well as retention measures) under coherently compiled assumptions concerning their potential future evolution, we employ decision theory methods to address the challenge of how to sustain present-day protection-levels under enhanced flooding-occurrences derived from ensembles of downscaled climate-change projections associated with different future pathways of mankind. Achieved results highlight the significance of this approach in forward-planning sustainable public protection-strategies and safeguarding critical infrastructure. This is of far-reaching importance because presented approaches allow for the consistent integration of decisive future threat-levels. Anticipatory planning is in fact urgently needed in this context because by now the maintenance of structures in place already makes up a substantial part of the total budget available for public measures. The achived findings of this study have already caused discussions by authorities in charge of civil protection on so far utilized decision-making processes. In addition, the intense cooperation with European transport, freight and logistics leaders has allowed us to estimate the implementation of presented strategies with regard to their future cost development. Apart from that results correspond to the recommendations of the Federal Ministry for Sustainability and Tourism (BMNT) regarding the Flood Directive and the publications of the European Union on flood protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floodings and landslides are amongst the most devastating damage-processes worldwide. Associated risk levels are particularly high in topographically complex terrain. Along with the increase in climate-change induced extreme-events, research devoted to the identification of so-called Climate Indices (CIs) describing weather phenomena triggering hazard-occurrences and intensities gain rising emphasis.In this study we accomplish the first-time unification of the three most comprehensive cadastres on weather-induced hazard-processes, compiled and maintained by federal authorities. The therefrom resulting 'event space' stretches seven decades from 1950 onwards and contains 20.000 hazard occurrences, classified into six different process-categories. Event data are analyzed together with a high-quality, daily-based dataset providing temperatures and precipitation totals on a 1 km grid across the Austrian part of the European Alps. On the resulting unprecedented extent of extreme-weather triggered hazard-processes and gridded weather observations, we are able to examine the hypothesis that daily sequences of precipitation-totals preceding damage-events allow for detecting temporal weather-sequences uniquely allocatable to various hazard-categories in three orographically distinct regions in the European Alps. We pursue this research aim by analyzing for each hazard-category its quadratic form representing the physics contained in the observations. Resulting eigen-directions, invariant under its inherent second order tensor, are the sought-for total-sequences (CIs) and hence reject the alternative hypothesis. Therefore, precipitation total-sequences can be uniquely assigned to every hazard category within each region, giving an overall of 18 CIs. It is important to note that findings based on this novel, objective approach do not contradict, but rather add to attained research achievements by introducing this new perspective on the subject. Obtained CIs have substantial potential in research and applications. In civil defense, safeguarding critical infrastructure, early warning systems and the development of sustainable protection strategies, findings are in implementation by responsible decision-makers and in intense discussion with the European Freight Leaders Forum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]