The timing of anthropogenic emergence in simulated climate extremes
By A. King, Markus G. Donat, Erich Fischer, Ed Hawkins, L. Alexander, D. Karoly, A. Dittus, S. Lewis, S. Perkins. 2015
186 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Determining the time of emergence of climates altered from their natural state by anthropogenic influences can help inform the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies to climate change. Previous studies have examined the time of emergence of climate averages. However, at the global scale, the emergence of changes in extreme events, which have the greatest societal impacts, has not been investigated before. Based on state-of-the-art climate models, we show that temperature extremes generally emerge slightly later from their quasi-natural climate state than seasonal means, due to greater variability in extremes. Nevertheless, according to model evidence, both hot and cold extremes have already emerged across many areas. Remarkably, even precipitation extremes that have very large variability are projected to emerge in the coming decades in Northern Hemisphere winters associated with a wettening trend. Based on our findings we expect local temperature and precipitation extremes to already differ significantly from their previous quasi-natural state at many locations or to do so in the near future. Our findings have implications for climate impacts and detection and attribution studies assessing observed changes in regional climate extremes by showing whether they will likely find a fingerprint of anthropogenic climate change.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f841fb2b48010e4c5560d94b86925a5a9f0e028
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Citations in the corpus
- Poorest countries experience earlier anthropogenic emergence of daily temperature extremes (2016, background): “…these implications have not been explored when considering the exposure of different parts of the global population to the emergence of extremes, particularly temperature extremes which have been found to occur much earlier than precipitation-related extremes (Fischer et al 2014, King et al 2015).”
- Extreme heat waves under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming (2018, background): “In tropical regions, where the present-day variability and the seasonal cycle is small, even a moderate temperature increase will result in longer heat waves (e.g. West Africa, supporting information figure S5, Fischer et al 2012a, King et al 2015, Harrington et al 2016, Dosio 2017).”
- Climate extremes in Europe at 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming (2017, background): “As expected from figure 1, we project larger increases in European-average temperature than for central England in both the median change and high percentile changes from 1.5 ◦C–2 ◦C.”
- The Inequality of Climate Change From 1.5 to 2°C of Global Warming (2018, background): “Similar results have been found previously (Hawkins & Sutton, 2012; King et al., 2015; Mahlstein et al., 2011, 2012; Schleussner et al., 2016), but it is remarkable that this difference in S/N ratios is so apparent for only a 0.5°C difference in global temperature.”
- Recent precipitation trends, flash floods and landslides in southern Brazil (2016, background): “Furthermore, urbanization, deforestation, and other land-use aspects are likely to vary in the future, which may subsequently induce distinct change in the spatial distribution of precipitation extremes (Ghosh et al 2011, King et al 2015).”