Autumn is the season in the Netherlands that warms up the most after summer. Autumn has also become significantly wetter. When we talk about climate change in the Netherlands, we often discuss winter and summer. But how does the climate actually change in autumn?
Temperature
Due to greenhouse gas emissions by humans, all months have become warmer since the beginning of the last century. Autumn is the season that warms up the most after summer. Compared to a century ago, autumn in the Netherlands is currently on average about 2 degrees warmer.
The temperature of September in the current climate (14.7 degrees) is even higher than the temperature in June at the beginning of the last century (14.4 degrees).
How the warming will continue to develop depends greatly on future greenhouse gas emissions. The KNMI23 climate scenarios show this for high and low future emissions of greenhouse gases. The higher the emissions, the warmer it gets.
By 2100, the average temperature in autumn in the low emission scenarios will have increased by about 1.0 degrees. In the high scenarios, it could increase by as much as 5.0 ℃ (see image 1, also KNMI Climate Dashboard).
Precipitation
In spring and autumn, precipitation increases, but less than in winter. Autumn has become about 15 percent wetter since the mid-20th century.
The warming in the climate scenarios is accompanied by drier summers and wetter winters, but the extent is uncertain. Therefore, there is a dry and wet variant of each scenario. In all climate scenarios, precipitation in autumn is expected to increase slightly in the future.
The wet scenarios predict an increase of 5 to 13 percent in the amount of precipitation by 2100, while the dry scenarios predict only a small increase of 1 to 4 percent.
