Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events

Abstract

Efforts to understand the influence of historical global warming on individual extreme climate events have increased over the past decade. However, despite substantial progress, events that are unprecedented in the local observational record remain a persistent challenge. Leveraging observations and a large climate model ensemble, we quantify uncertainty in the influence of global warming on the severity and probability of the historically hottest month, hottest day, driest year, and wettest 5-d period for different areas of the globe. We find that historical warming has increased the severity and probability of the hottest month and hottest day of the year at >80% of the available observational area. Our framework also suggests that the historical climate forcing has increased the probability of the driest year and wettest 5-d period at 57% and 41% of the observed area, respectively, although we note important caveats. For the most protracted hot and dry events, the strongest and most widespread contributions of anthropogenic climate forcing occur in the tropics, including increases in probability of at least a factor of 4 for the hottest month and at least a factor of 2 for the driest year. We also demonstrate the ability of our framework to systematically evaluate the role of dynamic and thermodynamic factors such as atmospheric circulation patterns and atmospheric water vapor, and find extremely high statistical confidence that anthropogenic forcing increased the probability of record-low Arctic sea ice extent. event attribution | climate extremes | climate change | global warming T he last decade has witnessed increasing interest in possible connections between historical global warming and individual extreme climate events (1-9). This interest is grounded in both scientific and practical motivations. First, extremes underlie many of the most acute stresses on natural and human systems (10, 11). Understanding the influence of historical warming on extremes is therefore critical for detecting climate change impacts (12, 13). Second, trends in the frequency and/or intensity of extremes have already been detected (10, 11), implying increasing probability of events that are unprecedented in the observed record. Third, continued global warming is likely to cause widespread emergence of unprecedented events in the future (e.g., refs. 10 and 14).Effective management of climate-related risks therefore requires robust quantification of the probability of extremes in the current and future climate (10). For example, quantification of risk and liability (8,15), and design of resilient infrastructure and resource management systems (16), must account for both historical nonstationarity and the likelihood of future changes. Similarly, the United Nations mechanisms for climate change compensation, adaptation, and preparation create a practical need to quantify the contribution of historical emissions to individual extreme events (e.g., ref. 17). Finally, connections between historical warming and individual events have b...

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