Changes in the Frequency of Observed Temperature Extremes Largely Driven by a Distribution Shift

Creators: Patel, Ronak N.¹; Bonan, David B.¹; Schneider, Tapio¹

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Extreme heat poses significant threats to human life and ecosystems. Quantifying the effects of anthropogenic climate change on extreme heat has remained challenging, in part due to the short observational record. Here, we isolate the most slowly varying component of the frequency at which the historical 90th and 99th percentiles were exceeded in observational records from 1955 to 2021 by using a statistical method called low‐frequency component analysis. The emerging spatiotemporal signal in the changing frequency of temperature extremes can be attributed to a shift of the temperature distribution by local warming of the annual‐mean daily maximum temperature. The shift explains over 80% of the interannual variability in the frequency at which the historical 90th percentile is exceeded in the tropics and up to 50% in higher latitudes. This work connects variability in the frequency of extreme surface temperatures to variability in mean local warming.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by Schmidt Sciences, LLC. D.B.B was supported the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF Grant DGE1745301).

Data Availability

Berkeley Earth Daily Maximum Temperature Data by decade can be found at the following location: https://berkeley-earth-temperature.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Global/Gridded/Complete_TMAX_Daily_LatLong1_YYYY.nc, where YYYY is the start of a decade such as 1950, 1960, 1970, etc.

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis data is available at Hersbach et al. (2023).

Supplemental Material

Supporting Information S1 (PDF)

Movie S1 (MP4)

Movie S2 (MP4)

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