Le lien entre circulation atmosphérique de grande échelle et canicules pour la prévision à longue échéance et l'impact du changement climatique

Climate models are designed to reproduce the average behaviour of the climatic parameters over quite large geographical areas, and the large scale atmospheric circulation. Large scale atmospheric circulation shows some stable and recurrent patterns, called weather regimes, whose succession can explain the local observed meteorological conditions. These structures are then identified for the summer season and their link with hot and dry days in France are studied. From the 4 identified summer regimes, 2 are associated with an increased occurrence of hot and dry conditions over France. Although this link does not explain the total summer variability, it can help to anticipate hot and dry conditions and it is used here for seasonal forecast perspectives and to analyse the impact of climate change on the occurrence of heat waves. Regarding seasonal forecast, an influence of anomalous tropical conditions (a northern shift of the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone) has been identified as susceptible to increase the occurrence frequency of the 2 regimes linked to hot and dry conditions in France in summer. Thus, if this link can be confirmed and if climate models are able to re-produce it correctly, then it could lead to an interesting anticipation of the possible occurrence of an heat wave in the next summer. As far as climate change is concerned, the study shows that in the future, one of the 2 hot and dry regimes could be more frequent, while the most cold and wet one becomes less frequent. Thus, globally, hot and dry days should occur more frequently. There are however still many uncertainties, as on the one hand, models show different results con-cerning the future occurrence of the regimes, and on the other hand, the other local mechanisms linked to the heat wave occurrence, like soil moisture content and evolution, are sometimes poorly represented.