Trends in Intense Heat and Cold Conditions in Cuba

Climate change has various negative environmental consequences, such as rising temperatures and the intensification of extreme weather events. These repercussions represent one of the greatest challenges for sustainable development and the population's well-being. Heat/cold waves are among the meteorological events associated with climate change. A trend analysis should be used to assess the change in the behavior of a variable over long periods. Therefore, the objective of this work was to analyze the trends in extreme heat and cold events, expressed through the indicators of Intense Cold Conditions and Intense Heat Conditions, during the period 1981-2023. This study covered the entire country, and 67 meteorological stations belonging to the Institute of Meteorology's network of stations were used. The existence of a trend is determined mainly using the Mann–Kendall statistic (Sneyers, 1975), in the direct and inverse sense, and change points are determined using Pettitt's test. The Spearman's and Wald–Wolfowitz tests were used as alternative tests. The significance level was chosen as 0.05 since the 95th percentile provides a good result in meteorology. In general, the existence of highly significant increasing trends was confirmed in the series corresponding to CCIsv and CCIcv in Cuba. However, this did not occur for CFIsv and CFIcv, for which, although they showed a lower number of cases in recent years in the multiannual analyses, the existence of trends could not be confirmed.