Seung-Ki Min, Xuebin Zhang, Francis Zwiers, Hideo Shiogama, Yu-Shiang Tung, and Michael Wehner

AMS Journal of Climate

Published date September 24, 2013

Multimodel Detection and Attribution of Extreme Temperature Changes

  • Conducts optimal fingerprinting analyses using 12 climate models integrated under anthropogenic-only forcing or natural plus anthropogenic forcing
  • Compares observed and simulated changes in annual extreme temperature indices of coldest night and day (TNn and TXn) and warmest night and day (TNx and TXx) from 1951 to 2000
  • Detects the anthropogenic signal in global and northern continental means of all four indices, albeit less robustly for TXx, which is consistent with previous findings
  • Finds the detected anthropogenic signals to be separable from natural forcing influence at the global scale and to a lesser extent at continental and subcontinental scales
  • Finds that detection occurs more frequently in TNx and TNn than in other indices, particularly at smaller scales, supporting previous studies based on different methods