Open AccessThe Role of Human Activity in the Recent Warming of Extremely Warm Daytime Temperatures
Author(s) -
Nikolaos Christidis,
Peter Stott,
Simon J. Brown
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of climate
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.315
H-Index - 287
eISSN - 1520-0442
pISSN - 0894-8755
DOI - 10.1175/2011jcli4150.1
Subject(s) - daytime , climatology , environmental science , extreme value theory , climate change , generalized extreme value distribution , global warming , atmospheric sciences , geology , mathematics , statistics , oceanography
Formal detection and attribution analyses of changes in daily extremes give evidence of a significant human influence on the increasing severity of extremely warm nights and decreasing severity of extremely cold days and nights. This paper presents an optimal fingerprinting analysis that also detects the contributions of external forcings to recent changes in extremely warm days using nonstationary extreme value theory. The authors’ analysis is the first that attempts to partition the observed change in warm daytime extremes between its anthropogenic and natural components and hence attribute part of the change to possible causes. Changes in the extreme temperatures are represented by the temporal changes in a parameter of an extreme value distribution. Regional distributions of the trend in the parameter are computed with and without human influence using constraints from the global optimal fingerprinting analysis. Anthropogenic forcings alter the regional distributions, indicating that extremely warm days have become hotter.