Climate of the Past Discussions www.clim-past-discuss.net 1814-9340 1814-9359 4 4 2008 10.5194/cpd-4-897-2008 http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/897/2008/ http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/897/2008/cpd-4-897-2008.html http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/4/897/2008/cpd-4-897-2008.pdf 897 928 2008-08-12 Western Europe is warming much faster than expected G. J. van Oldenborgh oldenborgh@knmi.nl S. Drijfhout A. van Ulden R. Haarsma A. Sterl C. Severijns W. Hazeleger H. Dijkstra Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), De Bilt, The Netherlands Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, Utrecht University, The Netherlands The warming trend of the last decades is now so strong that it is discernible in local temperature observations. This opens the possibility to compare the trend to the warming predicted by comprehensive climate models (GCMs), which up to now could not be verified directly to observations on a local scale, because the signal-to-noise ratio was too low. 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