Pal, J.S., F. Giorgi, and X. Bi, 2004: Consistency of recent European summer 
projection trends and extremes with future regional climate projections. 
Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L13202, doi:10.1029/2004GL019836. 
Patterns of recent summer trends in European droughts and floods are 
remarkably consistent with projected climate change, according to a recent 
study by a group of Italian scientists.  The trend in 500 hPa geopotential 
height (from NCEP data) and mean summer precipitation (from CRU data) where 
calculated by subtracting 1951-1975 average values from the 1976-2000 
values.   The ICTP Regional Climate model was run for two IPCC scenarios A2 
(a higher GHG scenario) and B2 (a lower GHG scenario).  The patterns from 
the model run (for both A2 and B2) were shown to be similar to the observed 
changes in the patterns over Europe.    However, as expected, the scale of 
the changes between recent changes and projected changes are different.  The 
authors concluded that although they cannot link the recent changes to 
anthropogenic greenhouse gases, the results do suggest observed drying 
trends might continue over much of Europe.