Human influence on frequency of temperature extremes

Abstract

We investigate the influence of external forcings on the frequency of temperature extremes over land at the global and continental scales by comparing HadEX3 observations and simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Programme Phase 6 (CMIP6) project. We consider four metrics including warm days and nights (TX90p and TN90p) and cold days and nights (TX10p and TN10p). The observational dataset during 1951-2018 shows continued increases in the warm days and nights and decreases in the cold days and nights in most land areas in the years after 2010. The area of the so-called 'warming hole' in North America is much reduced in 1951-2018 compared with that in 1951-2010. The comparison between observation and simulations based on an optimal fingerprinting method shows that the anthropogenic forcing, dominated by greenhouse gases, plays the most important role in the changes of the frequency indices. Changes in CMIP6 multi-model mean response to all forcing need to be scaled down to best match the observations, indicating that the multi-model ensemble mean may have overestimated the observed changes. Analyses that involve signals from anthropogenic and natural external forcings confirm that the anthropogenic signal can be detected over global land as a whole and for most continents in all temperature indices. Analyses that include signals from greenhouse gas (GHG), anthropogenic aerosol (AA) and natural external (NAT) forcings show that the GHG signal is detected in all indices over the globe and most continents while the AA signal can be detected mainly in the warm extremes but not the cold extremes over the globe and most continents. The effect of NAT is negligible in most land areas. GHG's warming effect is offset partially by AA's cooling effect. The combined effects from both explain most of the observed changes over the globe and continents.

Global Hotspots for Future Absolute Temperature Extremes From CMIP6 Models

“…Hu et al. (2020) also observed a general continued warming of temperature extremes over most land areas, especially during 2010–2018. Li et al.…”

“…These findings are consistent with previous literature, but there are some variations. Alexander et al (2006) observed that about two-thirds of the global land area exhibited a substantial increase in temperature extremes indices during 1951-2003. Hu et al (2020 also observed a general continued warming of temperature extremes over most land areas, especially during 2010-2018.…”

“…Hu et al. (2020) attributed the continued warming in temperature extremes to human influence. Similar attribution is valid for future trends in absolute temperature extremes.…”

A Comprehensive Study of Spatiotemporal Variations in Temperature Extremes across China during 1960–2018

“…There is now a general consensus that natural forces and human activities are the main drivers of extreme events [34][35][36]. We limited covariates that were relevant to temperature extremes and were readily available at the national scale during the study time period.…”

Improving the Estimation of Human Climate Influence by Selecting Appropriate Forcing Simulations

“…The former has a warming effect by reducing the efficiency with which the Earth emits longwave radiation, while the latter has a net cooling effect through increased scattering of shortwave radiation and changes in aerosol‐cloud interactions (Bellouin et al., 2020; Deser et al., 2020). Many detection and attribution studies have estimated their contributions to observed changes in a variety of climate variables at global and regional scales, including mean temperature (e.g., Jones et al., 2013; Najafi et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2016; Gillett et al., 2021; Zhou & Zhang, 2021), mean precipitation (e.g., Zhang et al., 2007; Wu et al., 2013), extreme temperature and precipitation indices (e.g., Seong et al., 2021; Hu et al., 2020; Paik et al., 2020), tropopause height (Santer et al., 2003), human health‐related wet bulb globe temperature (Li et al., 2017), and so on.…”