Historic and future increase in the global land area affected by monthly heat extremes

By Dim Coumou, A. Robinson. 2013

376 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climatic warming of about 0.5 ° C in the global mean since the 1970s has strongly increased the occurrence-probability of heat extremes on monthly to seasonal time scales. For the 21st century, climate models predict more substantial warming. Here we show that the multi-model mean of the CMIP5 (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) climate models accurately reproduces the evolution over time and spatial patterns of the historically observed increase in monthly heat extremes. For the near-term (i.e., by 2040), the models predict a robust, several-fold increase in the frequency of such heat extremes, irrespective of the emission scenario. However, mitigation can strongly reduce the number of heat extremes by the second half of the 21st century. Unmitigated climate change causes most (>50%) continental regions to move to a new climatic regime with the coldest summer months by the end of the century substantially hotter than the hottest experienced today. We show that the land fraction experiencing extreme heat as a function of global mean temperature follows a simple cumulative distribution function, which depends only on natural variability and the level of spatial heterogeneity in the warming.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/211af846d7d32f7a74f41cf5da29456e3c0259d7

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Citations in the corpus

Contrasting responses of urban and rural surface energy budgets to heat waves explain synergies between urban heat islands and heat waves (2015, background): “…very likely to become more frequent, last longer, and affect larger land areas in the late 21st century (Meehl and Tebaldi 2004, Lau and Nath 2012, Coumou and Robinson 2013, Lau and Nath 2014), as concluded by the Fifth Assessment Any further distribution of this workmustmaintain attribution to…”
The impact of climate change on incomes and convergence in Africa (2020, methodology): “To allow for a variation of the effect of weather and climate across different climatic zones (Mendelsohn, 2016), temperature is integrated in the model employing its deviation from the historical mean (Coumou & Robinson, 2013; Diffenbaugh & Scherer, 2011).”
Climate change and European forests: what do we know, what are the uncertainties, and what are the implications for forest management? (2014, background): “Coumou and Robinson (2013) found that multiple climate model runs predict a robust several-fold ntinuous dry days (left) and projected average change in the number of continuous dry data was available).”
Changes in observed climate extremes in global urban areas (2015, background): “For instance, increasing numbers of heat waves may lead to enhanced heat wave related mortality in urban areas (Coumou and Robinson 2013, Li et al 2013).”
Interactions between urban heat islands and heat waves (2018, background): “Previous studies using global climate models have either been limited to grid cell-average HWs (Coumou and Robinson 2013, Diffenbaugh and Ashfaq 2010, Fischer et al 2013, Gao et al 2012) or focused on the urban HWs in general rather than their synergistic effects with UHIs (Oleson et al 2015a).”
Climate change impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean and their implications for development (2017, background): “The tropics, along the coasts, will see the largest increase in such threshold-exceeding extremes which is confirmed by analyses using the full CMIP5 dataset (Coumou and Robinson 2013; Sillmann et al. 2013a, b).”
Top ten European heatwaves since 1950 and their occurrence in the coming decades (2015, background): “…will see significantly more intense hot extremes (Clark et al 2006, Fischer et al 2013), with a probability of occurrence of extreme heatwaves increasing by a factor of 5 to 10 (Beniston et al 2007, Barriopedro et al 2011, Rahmstorf and Coumou 2011, Coumou and Robinson 2013, Christidis et al 2015).”