Zhiwei Zhu and Tim Li

Journal of Climate

Published date May 8, 2017

The Record-Breaking Hot Summer in 2015 over Hawaii and Its Physical Causes

  • States that Hawaiian surface air temperature (HST) during summer 2015 (from July to October) was about 1.5°C higher than the climatological mean, which was the hottest since records began 1948
  • States that in the context of record-breaking seasonal-mean high temperature, 98 exceptional local heatwave days occurred during summer 2015
  • Demonstrates in this paper that the record-high summer HST of 2015 arose mainly from the combined effects of the interannual and interdecadal variability of sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA)