Ambitious climate change mitigation plans call for a significant increase in the use of renewables, which could, however, make the supply system more vulnerable to climate variability and changes. Here we evaluate climate change impacts on solar photovoltaic (PV) power in Europe using the recent EURO-CORDEX ensemble of high-resolution climate projections together with a PV power production model and assuming a well-developed European PV power fleet. Results indicate that the alteration of solar PV supply by the end of this century compared with the estimations made under current climate conditions should be in the range (−14%;+2%), with the largest decreases in Northern countries. Temporal stability of power generation does not appear as strongly affected in future climate scenarios either, even showing a slight positive trend in Southern countries. Therefore, despite small decreases in production expected in some parts of Europe, climate change is unlikely to threaten the European PV sector.

This paper presents trends in downward surface shortwave radiation (SSR) over Europe, which are based on the 56 longest series available from the Global Energy Balance Archive that are mainly concentrated in central Europe. Special emphasis has been placed on both ensuring the temporal homogeneity and including the most recent years in the data set. We have generated, for the first time, composite time series for Europe covering the period 1939–2012, which have been studied by means of running trend analysis. The mean annual SSR series shows an increase from the late 1930s to the early 1950s (i.e., early brightening), followed by a reduction until mid‐1980s (i.e., global dimming) and a subsequent increase up to the early 2000s (i.e., global brightening). The series ends with a tendency of stabilization since the early 21st century, but the short time period is insufficient with regard to establishing whether a change in the trend is actually emerging over Europe. Seasonal and regional series are also presented, which highlight that similar variations are obtained for most of the seasons and regions across Europe. In fact, due to the strong spatial correlation in the SSR series, few series are enough to capture almost the same interannual and decadal variability as using a dense network of stations. Decadal variations of the SSR are expected to have an impact on the modulation of the temperatures and other processes over Europe linked with changes in the hydrological cycle, agriculture production, or natural ecosystems. For a better dissemination of the time series developed in this study, the data set is freely available for scientific purposes.

In this study, we consider the historical climatological time series available in the meteorological yearbooks of the Royal Hungarian Central Institute of Meteorology and Earth Magnetism, first published in 1871. Data quality improvement of historical data includes the homogenization process with outlier checks and data gap filling by applying the MASH software. We investigated 13 stations from the Carpathian Region having the most complete monthly temperature and precipitation time series for the period of 1871–1918 and 8 stations with fog observations (1886–1916). First, statistical tests were conducted to compare the main statistics of the historical datasets (1871–1918) with current data (1971–2020). The sources of the current data are the National Meteorological Administration of Romania and the European Climate Assessment & Dataset. The results show significant changes between the two periods. In the whole region, the mean temperature in the last five decades (1971–2020) was 0.77 °C higher than in 1871–1918. Changes in the frequency of foggy situations were also detected. On an annual scale, in the last 31-year period (1990–2020), the number of foggy days increased by 16.2 compared with 1886–1916. Even if some local trends can be detected in the historical periods (e.g., Cluj-Napoca), significant changes are much more characteristic in the recent period.