Historical trends in climate indices relevant to surface air temperature and precipitation in Japan for recent 120 years

Abstract

Geographical distributions of trends in climate indices with statistical significance in Japan are investigated at each of the 51 observation stations for the recent 120 years. We employed a comprehensive set of the 70 climate indices on an annual timescale to detect climate changes and to facilitate climate information for a variety of sectors, which are developed by expert team on sector-specific indices in the World Meteorological Organization. The rising trends have regional differences such as the annual mean of daily maximum and minimum surface air temperatures in the Kanto-Koushin region. The statistically significant increasing trends in three daily heavy precipitationrelevant climate indices, R95p, R99p, and RX1day, are seen in Hokuriku, Shikoku, the western part of Northern and Southern Kyusyu regions, and isolated stations in the other regions. Rotational empirical orthogonal function analysis of R99p revealed different features of statistically significant modes suggesting the trends are attributed to changes in different atmospheric phenomena as well as those of warm spell duration index. The number of the stations with statistically significant trends varies with an index. Indies relevant to daily minimum surface air temperatures have statistically significant trends at most of the 51 stations. Consecutive dry days are the most sensitive to climate changes for the 120 years among the indices relevant to precipitation in this analysis. The indices relevant to heavy precipitation are not always been most sensitive to climate change detections in Japan. The geographical distributions of the percentage of the number of indices with statistically significant changes to the total number of the stations provide information about stations sensitive to climate changes. The highest sensitivity is seen at Kumamoto. These results directly provide detection of climate changes and show the potentials of which index is sensitive to ongoing climate changes from the viewpoint of geographical distributions.

Future projections of extreme precipitation in Tropical America and Panama under global warming based on 150‐year continuous simulations using 20‐km and 60‐km atmospheric general circulation models

“…We analysed the extreme precipitation and SAT values generated by AGCM20 and AGCM60. Rx1d is an index of extreme precipitation that is widely used in climate studies, including IPCC AR6 (IPCC, 2021) and Nakaegawa and Murazaki (2022). We calculated Rx1d using ClimPACT software (Alexander & Herold, 2016).…”

Observed Global Changes in Sector‐Relevant Climate Extremes Indices—An Extension to HadEX3

“…The valuable approach of developing indices, running workshops and providing standardized software was adopted by the WMO Commission for Climatology (CCl) Expert Team on Climate Risk and Sector‐specific Climate Indices (ET‐CRSCI) and subsequently the Expert Team for Sector‐specific Climate Indices (ET‐SCI) to develop the ability to monitor changes in climate conditions relevant to a number of societal sectors (Alexander & Herold, 2015; Herold & Alexander, 2016). These “ET‐SCI indices” extend the ETCCDI indices and enable those working in sectors such as agriculture, health and water resources to more directly determine how relevant climate extremes affect their focal regions, using both single and multiple variable indices to identify simple and complex climate risks for example, (Herold et al., 2018; McGree et al., 2020; Nakaegawa & Murazaki, 2022; Oliveira et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2023). Since the inaugural workshop in 2011 held to develop these indices with experts in these fields, they have continued to be discussed, assessed and updated to ensure their relevance through regional workshops and WMO‐related group discussions.…”