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Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events

2017; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 114; Issue: 19 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1618082114

1091-6490

Noah S. Diffenbaugh, Deepti Singh, Justin Mankin, Daniel E. Horton, Daniel L. Swain, Danielle Touma, Allison Charland, Yunjie Liu, Matz A. Haugen, Michael Tsiang, Bala Rajaratnam,

Hydrology and Drought Analysis

Significance Extreme climate events have increased in many regions. Efforts to test the influence of global warming on individual events have also increased, raising the possibility of operational, real-time, single-event attribution. We apply four attribution metrics to four climate variables at each available point on a global grid. We find that historical global warming has increased the severity and probability of the hottest monthly and daily events at more than 80% of the observed area and has increased the probability of the driest and wettest events at approximately half of the observed area. Our results suggest that scientifically durable operational attribution is possible but they also highlight the importance of carefully diagnosing and testing the physical causes of individual events.