Romania's extreme weather events

Romania is known to have a temperate climate with 4 alternating seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter. To date, there is no history of tropical cyclones. There are however other phenomena, such as: snow blizzards, heatwaves and drought.

Blizzards

Quite a few severe winter snowstorms were registered in the past years, (snow blizzards, namely) which have continuously increased in intensity and become more severe recently.
In February 2012, according to http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/01/extreme-cold-weather-eastern-europe, six homeless people have died of hypothermia as temperatures plunged to -32.5C, the health ministry reported. And hundreds of people were sent to shelters to protect them from the extreme cold.
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrgJBwOmAD4, a red code was issued for the very first time in January 2014 in Romania in parts of the South East because of the severe snow blizzards. Trains were cancelled, schools and ports were closed, power was cut off, many villages were completely cut off, transport by helicopter was made impossible.


An interesting article located at http://www.romania-insider.com/new-report-shows-the-countries-most-damaged-by-extreme-weather-where-does-romania-stand/137273/ about the Global Climate Risk Index,  shows Romania to be ranking 29th in the 2015 Global Climate Risk Index. Based on the number of deaths in 2013, Romania ranks 42, while in terms of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, Romania is at number 61 in the index. And based on financial losses in USD, Romania ranks 24th, according to the same report.




Heatwaves

In June and July 2007 there were at least two heatwaves reported that killed more than 20 people according to http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6902523.stm and 27 people according to http://www.nbcnews.com/id/19916533/ns/weather/t/european-heat-wave-blamed-deaths/#.VTrGGWPZqSo. In 2012, another major heatwave hit Romania reaching 42 Celsius degrees. http://www.romania-insider.com/heatwave-continues-in-romania-with-temperatures-reaching-42c/62555/Romanian authorities issued a code orange alert for high temperatures in Bucharest and 22 counties in Southern and Eastern Romania.
A study on heatwaves in Romania (http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2015/EGU2015-7262.pdf) written by Adina-Eliza Croitoru from Babes-Bolyai University - Department of Geography, Cluj Napoca, Romania concluded that the most numerous and the longest heat waves are specific to Southern and Western regions of Romania, while the less and the shortest ones were recorded in the Southeast. In addition, the great majority of weather stations recorded increasing trends to all heat waves parameters: heat waves number, heat waves day frequency, heat waves mean duration, heat waves maximum duration.


Due to global warming and climate change,  severe snow blizzards and storms in the winter and heat waves in the summer have become more common and have translated into a constantly recurring reality. There is not much that Romanian authorities can influence in this respect if there is no concerted effort on the part Europe to contain global warming and try to prevent these extreme weather events. Many Europeans expressed interest in knowing if heatwaves or blizzards are caused by global warming as noted by Keller and Blodgett. It is also noted that "meteorologists cannot tell if a single weather event is the result of changes that humans have made to the atmosphere. They can, however, estimate the probability that human influence has increased the risk of a heatwave exceeding a given magnitude. (Keller and Blodgett, 269).

Drought

A study on drought conditions and management strategies in Romania, available at http://www.ais.unwater.org/ais/pluginfile.php/548/mod_page/conten/72/Romania_CountryReport.pdf, the drought affects 7.1 million ha, which represent 48% from the total agricultural land.The South, Southeast and East parts of our country are the most hit areas (<600 m3 water /hectare) by extreme and severe drought). During the extremely droughty years average yields of various crops represented only 35, 60 percent of the potential yields. An analysis of the 1901-2010 interval focused on annual mean air temperatures recorded by weather stations that possess observation data sequences covering more than 100 years, has shown an increase of 0.5 C in the annual mean temperature over 1988 - 2010 (10.2 C) as against the whole analysis interval (9.7 C), which is lower than the global mean warming of 0.6 C. As regards the decadal evolution of annual mean air temperature, it was higher by 0.4-0.6 C over 2001-2010 than in every decade from 1961 to 2010. Concerning precipitation, the 1900-2010 period highlighted a general decreasing trend in the annual precipitation after the year 1961 and a parallel enhancement of the precipitation deficit, especially in the South, South East and East of the country. Since 1901 until now, Romania has seen in every decade one to four extremely droughty/rainy years, an increasing number of droughts being more and more apparent especially after 1981.
The drought that occurred in 2012 was particularly devastating to crops and food, as shown by the video available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-19292597

With respect to what Romanian authorities are doing in order to alert people, they do issue red codes in addition to warning codes and they inform the population about these severe weather events via television, radio and press.