Climate variability and change in the Greater Alpine Region over the last two centuries based on multi‐variable analysis

Abstract An extensive analysis of the HISTALP database is presented with the aim of giving a comprehensive picture of secular climate variability and change in the Greater Alpine Region (GAR, 4–19 E, 43–49 N). The HISTALP database encompasses 242 sites and concerns temperature, pressure, precipitation, cloudiness, sunshine duration, vapour pressure and relative humidity. The analyses are based on four regional mean records representing different GAR low‐level areas and on an additional mean record representing high‐level locations. The first goal of the paper is to give an overview of the seasonal and annual records for the different variables, aiming to highlight both variability on decadal time scale and long‐term evolution. Then it focuses on trend and correlation analysis. Trends are presented both for the period of common data availability for all regional average series and for moving windows that permit studying the trends over a wide range of timescales. Correlations among the different variables are presented both for the regional average series and for their high‐pass‐filtered versions. The analyses, beside highlighting a warming that is about twice as large as the global trend, also show that the different variables have responded in different ways to this warming and that the mutual interactions linking the different variables are often present only at specific temporal scales and only in parts of the GAR and in defined seasons. In spite of this complex behaviour, which may also be due to some residual inhomogeneities still affecting the data, the analyses give evidence that the HISTALP database has an excellent internal consistency and show that the availability of a multi‐variable database turns out to be very useful in order to evaluate the reliability of the reconstruction of each variable and to better understand the behaviour and the mutual interactions of the different variables. Copyright © 2009 Royal Meteorological Society