Development of an Updated Global Land In Situ‐Based Data Set of Temperature and Precipitation Extremes: HadEX3

Abstract

We present the second update to a data set of gridded land‐based temperature and precipitation extremes indices: HadEX3. This consists of 17 temperature and 12 precipitation indices derived from daily, in situ observations and recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). These indices have been calculated at around 7,000 locations for temperature and 17,000 for precipitation. The annual (and monthly) indices have been interpolated on a 1.875°×1.25° longitude‐latitude grid, covering 1901–2018. We show changes in these indices by examining ”global”‐average time series in comparison with previous observational data sets and also estimating the uncertainty resulting from the nonuniform distribution of meteorological stations. Both the short and long time scale behavior of HadEX3 agrees well with existing products. Changes in the temperature indices are widespread and consistent with global‐scale warming. The extremes related to daily minimum temperatures are changing faster than the maximum. Spatial changes in the linear trends of precipitation indices over 1950–2018 are less spatially coherent than those for temperature indices. Globally, there are more heavy precipitation events that are also more intense and contribute a greater fraction to the total. Some of the indices use a reference period for calculating exceedance thresholds. We present a comparison between using 1961–1990 and 1981–2010. The differences between the time series of the temperature indices observed over longer time scales are shown to be the result of the interaction of the reference period with a warming climate. The gridded netCDF files and, where possible, underlying station indices are available from http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadex3 and http://www.climdex.org.

Observed and Projected Changes in Temperature and Precipitation in the Core Crop Region of the Humid Pampa, Argentina

“…These changes in frequency of temperature extremes are consistent with global trends [35,54]. At regional scales, the changes are also consistent with the results in Rusticucci et al [55], who analyzed temperature variability in central-eastern Argentina.…”

The North American Spring Coldness Response to the Persistent Weak Stratospheric Vortex Induced by Extreme El Niño Events

“…The advantage for this definition is that it is directly comparable with observational series, which eliminates the structural model uncertainties to a great extent (e.g., Sillmann et al, 2013;King et al, 2017;Zhu et al, 2020). The simulated T10 based on climatological run is ∼10% averaged in North America (20°N-80°N, 170-50°W), being similar with the observational results based on extreme dataset HadEX2 (Donat et al, 2013;Dunn et al, 2020). TN is the seasonal coldest daily temperature, giving absolute extremes (in contrast to T10).…”

Changes in Annual Extremes of Daily Temperature and Precipitation in CMIP6 Models

“…To evaluate the simulated present-day temperature and precipitation extremes, we rely on the latest European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al 2018) as well as other reference datasets such as the ERA-Interim reanalysis (Dee et al 2011), NCEP-Department of Energy (DOE) reanalysis 2 (NCEP2; Kanamitsu et al 2002), and the recently updated Hadley Centre Global Climate Extremes Index 3 (HadEX3) dataset of land-based gridded observations (Dunn et al 2020). Compared to the prior generation ERA-Interim, ERA5 features enhanced spatial resolution (31 km) and improved model physics and core dynamics and assimilates much more observational data, including precipitation information from ground-based radar observations, although only for 2009 onward.…”