LAUSR

The paper presents a series of maps of extreme climatic characteristics for the Ural region and their changes under climate warming observed in last decades. We calculate threshold, absolute and percentile-based indices with the use of daily temperature and precipitation dataset of 99 weather stations of Roshydromet. Extreme climatic characteristics were averaged by moving 30-year periods from 1951 to 2010 for temperature and from 1966 to 2015 for precipitation. The regression-based interpolation was used for mapping climatic extremes taking into consideration the influence of topography. Elevation and general curvature of the terrain are considered as independent variables. In addition, the changes of extreme characteristics between the 30-year periods were estimated. As a result, a series of maps of temperature and precipitation extremes for the Ural region has been created. The maps present not only spatial distribution of the climatic extremes, but also regional features of their changes under climate warming. In general, the revealed changes in extremes in the Ural region correspond to the trends observed on the most of the territory of Russia. There is a substantial decrease of the number of extremely cold days in winter, and the minimum winter temperature has a strong positive trend (up to 1-5°C/30 years). The maximum temperature in summer has a positive trend in most of the territory, but the increase rate does not exceed 2°C between 1951–1980 and 1981–2010. The precipitation extremes also increased up to 0.5-1.5 mm when comparing 1966–1995 and 1985–2015 periods.