Urban areas are experiencing strongly increasing hot extremes. However, these events have seldom been the focus of traditional detection and attribution analysis designed for regional-to-global changes. Here, we show that compound (day-night sustained) hot extremes are more dangerous than solely daytime or nighttime heat, especially to female and older urban residents. Urban compound hot extremes across Eastern China have increased by 1.76 days decade -1 in 1961-2014, with fingerprints of urban expansion and anthropogenic emissions detected by a stepwise detection and attribution method. Their attributable fractions are estimated as 0.51 (urbanization), 1.63 (greenhouse gases) and -0.54 (other anthropogenic forcings) days decade -1 . Future emissions and urbanization would make these compound events two-to-five times more frequent (2090s vs. 2010s), leading to a three-to-sixfold growth in urban population exposure. Our findings call for tailored adaptation planning against rapidly growing health threats from compound heat in cities.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.