Increase of extreme events in a warming world

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - Tập 108 Số 44 - Trang 17905-17909 - 2011
Stefan Rahmstorf1, Dim Coumou1
1Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, PO Box 601203, 14412 Potsdam, Germany

Tóm tắt

We develop a theoretical approach to quantify the effect of long-term trends on the expected number of extremes in generic time series, using analytical solutions and Monte Carlo simulations. We apply our method to study the effect of warming trends on heat records. We find that the number of record-breaking events increases approximately in proportion to the ratio of warming trend to short-term standard deviation. Short-term variability thus decreases the number of heat extremes, whereas a climatic warming increases it. For extremes exceeding a predefined threshold, the dependence on the warming trend is highly nonlinear. We further find that the sum of warm plus cold extremes increases with any climate change, whether warming or cooling. We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8. For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80% probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Tập 108 Số 44

17905-17909

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