Status: Ongoing analysis Material from: Linus, Rebecca
1. Impact
During March, April and May 2022 north-western India and Pakistan experienced much higher temperatures than normal. For example, during the second week of May several stations reached 50C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_heat_wave_in_India_and_Pakistan
2. Description of the event
The plot below shows the the-series for 12UTC temperatures for Jacobabad in Pakistan for 2021 (grey) and so far in 2022 (red). Daily values as thin lines, 7-days running mean as thick lines and ERA5 daily climatology as dashed lines. Since mid-March 2022 to mid-May the city experienced a more or less continuous heatwave.
The plots below shows the climatological (ERA5 1991-2020) mean (left) and max (right) UTCI for May. Anything over 26 indicates some heat stress, and >46 is extreme heat stress.
The animation below shows the daily max (from hourly ERA5 data) UTCI for each day from 1st March 2022 to 19th May 2022:
The plots below show the difference between the ERA5 mean UTCI for April 2022 and the ERA5 climatological mean UTCI for April (1991-2020) (left), and the difference between the ERA5 max UTCI for April 2022, and the 75th percentile of climatology (right)
The animation below shows the difference between the ERA5 daily mean UTCI and the ERA5 climatological mean UTCI (1991-2020, based on monthly means for the respective month), for each day from 1st March to 19th May 2022:
3. Predictability
3.1 Data assimilation
The plot below shows the observation statistics from the land data assimilation for the synop from Jacobabad, in bins of 2 hours.
3.2 HRES
3.3 ENS
The plot below show the forecast evolution plot for maximum 2-metre temperature in Jacobabad on 14 May. HRES (red), CF (purple) and observation (green). ENS distribution (blue) and model climate (red) with maximum as black triangle. Already the forecast from 14 April showed a clear sign for warmer than normal conditions.
3.4 Monthly forecasts
The plots below show composites of weekly 2-metre temperature anomalies for the 9-week period 14 March - 15 May, from ERA5 (left), 1-week forecasts (middle) and 6-week forecasts (right). Already the composite all all 6-week forecast shows the heatwave over Pakistan and northern India, but was falsely predicting warmer than normal over for example China.
