The work for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) has begun and the Mediterranean region will be a key point to be evaluated in the chapter of the Working Group II "Climate Change 2013: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability". The results of the CIRCE project could be very precious to contribute to this chapter, as Antonio Navarra (CIRCE co-chair) and Silvio Gualdi (CIRCE RL 2 co-leader) declared during the CIRCE Third General Assembly in Madrid (Spain) on 17-19 March.

The paper "Heat wave changes in the eastern Mediterranean since 1960" by Kuglitsch et al., recently published in Geophysical Research Letters and supported by CIRCE, was selected for the new "Research Spotlight" section of Eos, American Geophysical Union- AGU's weekly newspaper. 
Eos, established in 1919, is published every Tuesday and is distributed by mail to the members of the AGU, who are more than 50,000 geoscientists worldwide, interested in atmospheric science, the biogeosciences, geochemistry, geophysics, hydrology, oceanography, petrology, planetology, seismology, space science, tectonophysics, and volcanology.
The choice to include the Kuglitsch et al.'s paper in Eos' Research spotlight underlines the importance of the research conducted within the CIRCE project.

Since the 1960s, the mean heat wave intensity, heat wave length and heat wave number across the eastern Mediterranean have increased. More than the previous studies relied on. The paper of  Kuglitsch et al. “Heat wave changes in the eastern Mediterranean since 1960”, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, provides new and reliable information on heat waves evolution in the Eastern Mediterranean (including Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey) from 1960 to 2006. The study, supported by CIRCE, has involved several researchers from the CIRCE community.

81,000 years ago Mediterranean sea level was much higher than previously thought, according to studies based on the use of stalagmites or stalactites. In a recent paper, published on Science, Dorale et al. discuss estimates of sea level derived from speleotherm encrustations from caves at Mallorca.
Mikis Tsimplis, staff member of CIRCE RL1- Identification and attribution of present climate trends and RL6- Extreme Events  and researcher from the Natural Environment Research Council- NOCS (UK), comments on the speculations proposed in the Science paper.