Blue tongue disease and climate change over Europe

The blue tongue disease (catarrhal fever) is a non contagious, insect-borne viral disease of ruminants, affecting mainly sheep and less frequently the cattle. It is caused by the the bluetongue virus, transmitted by different culicoides (fly). A significant increase of the disease has been seen since the last decade over Northern Europe. This work is a first attempt to relate climate change (as the virus is temperature driven) and the possible change in the affected areas over Europe for the next upcoming decades, based on the ENSEMBLES RCM simulations.
Here is a short report concerning preliminary results:
Blue_tongue_results.pdf

Validation Atlas for ENSEMBLES RCMs runs over Europe

This is a link to a short document including few validation maps (climatology, variance) for 4 models of the ENSEMBLES RCM database. The recent climate linear trends are also highlighted, and few climate projections are shown (2030-2050 minus 1961-2000).
This is done for the summer (JJA) and winter (DJF) seasons and for 4 impact variables:

Rainfall
2meter temperature
Minimum and maximum temperatures.

Other analyses would be updated later (time series....)

The link: Valid_RCM.doc