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Opacity

Summer Tourism June to August

Key messages:

  • Climate conditions favourable for tourism during the core summer season are projected to improve in Central and Northern Europe
  • Some Mediterranean areas are projected to experience warming over the comfort zone. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Cyprus are going to be most affected.

Why is the content of this map important?

Climate and weather patterns are essential factors for summer tourism activities. Changes in temperature, precipitation and other climate variables have a tendency to affect the popularity of summer tourism destinations. It is important to know how +2°C and +3°C may affect the summer tourism in the future.

Which sectors are affected by this result?

The results refer to climate change effects on tourism from June to August, thus, directly effecting the summer tourism sector. Readers are encouraged to see the respective results during May to October that consist the entire summer tourism season for Europe.

What is shown on the maps?

This map shows the climate favourability for summer tourism through the Tourism Climate Index (TCI). This index is composed of several climatic parameters such as temperature, sunshine duration, wind and others. TCI ranges between 0 and 100, with the optimal to be 90 to 100.

In most European regions, climate favourability for summer tourism activities is expected to increase under a +2°C and +3°C global warming. However, some regions tend to become warmer than the optimal, with their climate favourability reducing. Southern parts of Spain and Portugal, Italy, Greece and Cyprus are the most negatively affected regions in Europe. Northern Spain and France are among the most positively affected. The changes become even more pronounced in the +3°C global warming.

Details and further information:

The TCI is a summary of ratings of five human comfort indices related to sightseeing tourism. TCI is favored as an index because it comprises one of the most comprehensive metrics that integrates the three essential facets of climate that are relevant to tourism. These facets are comprised of: thermal comfort, physical aspects such as rain and wind, and the aesthetical facet of sunshine/cloudiness. At the same time it makes use of climate variables.

Additional information:

To investigate this, the ensemble of the five mandatory climate simulations is used as input to calculate the Tourism Climate Index (TCI) under a +2°C global warming. Hence, the ensemble consists of 5 simulations in total.

For the +3°C global warming case the analysis is based on the standard set of four climate simulations.

Author:

Kostas Seiradakis

Technical University of Crete (TUC), Greece