Comparing local versus hemispheric perspectives of extreme heat events

van Loon, Senne and Thompson, David W. J. (2023) Comparing local versus hemispheric perspectives of extreme heat events. Geophysical Research Letters, 50 (24). ISSN 0094-8276

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Abstract

We compare insights provided by local and large-scale perspectives of extreme heat events in ERA5 near-surface temperature data. Heat waves where temperatures exceed four standard deviations about the climatological-mean are expected less than once a century locally but occur roughly once every 10 days somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes. The high frequency of occurrence indicated by the hemispheric perspective is not well represented by normal statistics because it strongly depends on the shapes of the local temperature distributions. The large effective sample size afforded by the hemispheric perspective provides robust evidence of trends in the frequency of occurrence of extreme heat events integrated over the Northern Hemisphere. It also confirms that trends in heat events summed over the hemisphere can be explained by changes in mean temperature alone.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability Statement: All ERA5 data (Hersbach et al., 2020, 2023) is available at the Climate Data Store (C3S, 2023). HadCRUT5 data (Morice et al., 2021) is available from https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data//temperature/. All data analysis is done with Python 3.9 and Matlab R2022a. Figures are created in Python and PGF/TikZ Funding Information: DWJT is funded by the NSF Climate and Large-Scale Dynamics Program AGS-2116186.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Climatic Research Unit Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	14 Apr 2025 13:30
Last Modified:	23 Apr 2025 09:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99025
DOI:	10.1029/2023GL105246

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