Evolution of extreme temperatures in Belgium since the 1950s

The objective of the present study is to apply a wide range of efficient trend estimation methods for understanding how temperature extremes are locally changing. Temporal patterns of changes in extreme daily maximum or minimum temperature at homogeneous climate stations located in Belgium and their associations with changes in climate means are examined for the period 1952/1953 until present. A considerable amount of work is devoted to the formulation of extreme value models in the presence of non-stationarity. The covariate process is considered to be linear in time or/and in the North Atlantic Oscillation index as well. Additional insights on historical changes in frequency and amplitude of temperature extremes are obtained with the non-parametric quantile-perturbation approach.