Changes in concurrent monthly precipitation and temperature extremes

By Zenchao Hao, Amir Aghakouchak, T. Phillips. 2013

346 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While numerous studies have addressed changes in climate extremes, analyses of concurrence of climate extremes are scarce, and climate change effects on joint extremes are rarely considered. This study assesses the occurrence of joint (concurrent) monthly continental precipitation and temperature extremes in Climate Research Unit (CRU) and University of Delaware (UD) observations, and in 13 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) global climate simulations. The joint occurrences of precipitation and temperature extremes simulated by CMIP5 climate models are compared with those derived from the CRU and UD observations for warm/wet, warm/dry, cold/wet, and cold/dry combinations of joint extremes. The number of occurrences of these four combinations during the second half of the 20th century (1951–2004) is assessed on a common global grid. CRU and UD observations show substantial increases in the occurrence of joint warm/dry and warm/wet combinations for the period 1978–2004 relative to 1951–1977. The results show that with respect to the sign of change in the concurrent extremes, the CMIP5 climate model simulations are in reasonable overall agreement with observations. However, the results reveal notable discrepancies between regional patterns and the magnitude of change in individual climate model simulations relative to the observations of precipitation and temperature.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5b2318d7be877ba8dcf29044da5738dc46a4831

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Citations in the corpus

Non-stationary extreme value analysis in a changing climate (2014, background): “…:A. AghaKouchak (*) University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA e-mail: amir.a@uci.edu E. Gilleland : R. W. Katz National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO 80307, USA warm-wet conditions) have increased significantly in the second half of the 20th century (Hao et al. 2013).”
Substantial increase in concurrent droughts and heatwaves in the United States (2015, background): “The interaction between precipitation and temperature has been widely recognized in numerous studies (18, 19).”
Changes in the severity of compound drought and hot extremes over global land areas (2018, background): “Meanwhile, a number of studies on the frequency or spatial extent of different compounddrought and hot extremes have demonstrated its increased risk under global warming (Hao et al 2013, Mazdiyasni and AghaKouchak 2015, Sharma andMujumdar 2017).”
Dependence of drivers affects risks associated with compound events (2017, background): “RESULTS A simple approach to investigate the occurrence rate of extremely hot and dry warm seasons consists of counting the number of years in which both variables exceed a quantile-based threshold (30).”