Quantifying the Occurrence of Record Hot Years Through Normalized Warming Trends
Affiliation
Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, University of ArizonaIssue Date
2021Keywords
Arctic amplificationEarth system models
extreme heat
normalized warming trends
tropical amplification
warming trends
Metadata
Show full item recordPublisher
Blackwell Publishing LtdCitation
Zeng, X., Reeves Eyre, J. E. J., Dixon, R. D., & Arevalo, J. (2021). Quantifying the Occurrence of Record Hot Years Through Normalized Warming Trends. Geophysical Research Letters, 48(10).Journal
Geophysical Research LettersRights
© 2021 American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.Collection Information
This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu.Abstract
Surface air temperature trends and extreme events are of global concern and they are related. Here, we show that the occurrence of record hot years over different latitudes from 1960 to 2019 are more strongly correlated with the observational annual mean temperature trends normalized by internal variability. Compared with the raw trends showing Arctic amplification, the normalized trends show a tropical amplification over land. Two hot spots with more frequent occurrence of record hot years are identified: northern hemisphere ocean (vs. land) and southern hemisphere tropical land (vs. mid- and high-latitude lands). Ensemble mean results from 32 Earth system models agree with observations better than individual models, but they do not reproduce observed large differences in correlations across latitudes between normalized trends and record-breaking events over land versus ocean. Our results enable the quantification of record hot year occurrence through normalized warming trends and provide new metrics for model evaluation and improvement. © 2021. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.Note
6 month embargo; first published: 21 May 2021ISSN
0094-8276Version
Final published versionae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1029/2020GL091626