ClimShift – A new toolbox for the detection of climate change

Abstract

Climate change no longer involves and affects just a few people or communities. However, most of them need climate change detection studies to adapt to the current and future climate conditions efficiently. The present research aimed to detect climate changes by considering the shift in climate conditions from one region to another over different periods based on a similarity index in the Carpathians basin using the new ClimShift toolbox, specially created for this purpose. Developed in R, based on the cosine similarity index and using a set of 32 climate indices (temperature and precipitation), ClimShift uses NC raster format (NetCDF files) as input data. The application is compatible with Microsoft and Unix/Linux environments. The toolbox allows the detection of forward and backward climate shifts. The results can be employed as a Climate Service and are extremely helpful for an efficient process of adaption to climate changes at a local/regional scale. A user-friendly interface and a tutorial on how to use the toolbox are also available. The toolbox was tested for four locations in the Carpathians Basin (Vienna, Bekes, Cluj-Napoca and Kosice) using 1961–1990 as a base period and 1991–2021 as an analysis period for the forward climate shift analysis. For Cluj-Napoca, the application was also tested for the backward climate shift, using 1991–2021 as the base period and 1961–1990 as the analysis period, identifying the region where present climate conditions were specific during the older period. The scientific results indicated a significant shift towards the east and northeast from the older period to the most recent one and a low percentage (6%–10%) in the overlapping area with highly similar conditions between the two periods.