Elsevier

Science Bulletin

Volume 62, Issue 24, 30 December 2017, Pages 1673-1680
Science Bulletin

Article
Future extreme climate changes linked to global warming intensity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scib.2017.11.004Get rights and content

Abstract

Based on the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) daily dataset, we investigate changes of the terrestrial extreme climates given that the global mean temperature increases persistently under the Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 (RCP8.5) scenario. Compared to preindustrial conditions, more statistically significant extreme temperatures, precipitations, and dry spells are expected in the 21st century. Cold extremes decrease and warm extremes increase in a warmer world, and cold extremes tend to be more sensitive to global warming than the warm ones. When the global mean temperature increases, cold nights, cold days, and warm nights all display nonlinear relationships with it, such as the weakening of the link projected after 3 °C global warming, while the other indices generally exhibit differently, with linear relationships. Additionally, the relative changes in the indices related to extreme precipitation show significantly consistent linear changes with the global warming magnitude. Compared with the precipitation extremes, changes in temperature extremes are more strongly related to the global mean temperature changes. For the projection of the extreme precipitation changes, models show higher uncertainty than that in extreme temperature changes, and the uncertainty for the precipitation extremes becomes more remarkable when the global warming exceeds 5 °C.

Introduction

According to the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate system has been unequivocally warming, with a temperature increase of 0.85 (0.65–1.06) °C over the period of 1880–2012 [1]. Climate extremes have also varied along with the warmer climate of recent decades; and these extremes have far-reaching influences on the environment and ecosystem degradation and the sustainable development of economy and society, and they can drive thousands of people to go to extraordinary poverty [2], [3]. In the past few years, using the daily temperature and precipitation data, the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) presented a suit of extreme climate indices, which have been widely applied to facilitate the investigation of climate extremes globally [4], [5], [6], [7] and regionally [8], [9].

Several global warming thresholds have been paid wide attention to avoid the climate system to be disturbed by the anthropogenic interference; for instance, they include the 2 °C and a more ambitious target of 1.5 °C [10], [11]. Alarmingly, the projected global mean temperature rise could possibly exceed 4 °C in the 21st century [12], [13], [14], [15]. Accordingly, changes in extreme climates associated with different global warming targets have been investigated extensively. Wang et al. [16] used 26 models within the framework of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) to project extremely hot summers over land for 1 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C, 4 °C, and 5 °C levels. Schleussner et al. [17] assessed the differences between extreme climates under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warmings, using 11 CMIP5 models for the temperature extremes and 14 models for the precipitation extremes. On the regional scale, Vautard et al. [18] utilized six models under the SRES A1B to examine the changes in European climate extremes associated with a 2 °C global warming. At eight different global warming thresholds, the future changes in heat waves and precipitation extremes over China were projected by using 12 and 17 CMIP5 models, respectively [19], [20].

It should be noted that earlier studies focused only on the trends and spatial patterns of extreme climate changes at a certain threshold or at different global warming targets. A key question then arises as to how climate extremes scale with steadily continuous global warming. Previously, a clear demonstration was provided by Knutti et al. [21] that the pattern of the global mean precipitation scaled linearly with global temperature change. Compared with the mean climate, extreme climates are affected by more factors, including anomalous weather patterns and anthropogenic impacts [22]. In addition to the associated changes of extreme climates under a certain threshold or at different warming targets, it is of interest to investigate the potential relationship between extreme climate changes and the global warming intensity at the global scale. Additionally, climate models have been developed somewhat independently due to a set of numerical schemes for dynamic frameworks and parameterizations for processes [23], [24]. Individual models behave differently in response to the identical external forcings, and thus the inter-model uncertainty deserves special attention as well.

Given that, we use CMIP5 experiments under RCP8.5 to assess the linkage of the extreme temperature and precipitation events over land to the on-going global warming. The two questions to be addressed are: whether there is a detectable relationship in the changes of extreme climates over land and the magnitude of global warming; and whether individual models exhibit consistent relationships.

Section snippets

Data and method

In this work, the daily data from 25 CMIP5 models were obtained from the preindustrial control run and the 21st century projection experiments under the RCP8.5 scenario [24]. The output data can be accessible at the website, http://pcmdi9.llnl.gov. Table 1 provides the basic information about these models, and more detailed information can be visited in Taylor et al. [24]. The horizontal resolutions of the 25 models vary from 3.75° × ∼3.7° to 0.75° × ∼0.75°, and we use an area-weighted (for

Results

Fig. 1 illustrates that for both individual models and their median, how the global annual mean changes of the TNn, TXx, FD, and TR values over land scale for the changes of global mean surface temperature. The magnitude of the annual TNn averaged over land significantly increases with global warming, showing a clear linear trend between the two (Fig. 1a). The individual models show a relatively high level of consistency. The multimodel median is almost a straight line with a trend of

Conclusion and discussion

In this study, changes in the globally averaged extreme climate indices over land in response to the global warming intensity in the 21st century are projected based on numerical experiments performed by 25 CMIP5 models under RCP8.5. The results show that the extreme temperature events undergo asymmetrical changes, reflected in cold extremes versus warm ones, when the global mean temperature increases. As expected for temperature-related extremes, a warmer world features a decrease in cold

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions to improve this manuscript. We also acknowledge the climate modelling groups participating in the CMIP5 for producing and sharing their model outputs. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0602401) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41375084 and 41421004).

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