Nikolaos Christidis, Peter A. Stott, and Simon J. Brown

AMS Journal of Climate

Published date April 1, 2011

The Role of Human Activity in the Recent Warming of Extremely Warm Daytime Temperatures

  • Presents an optimal fingerprinting analysis that also detects the contributions of external forcings to recent changes in extremely warm days using nonstationary extreme value theory
  • The authors’ analysis is the first that attempts to partition the observed change in warm daytime extremes between its anthropogenic and natural components and hence attribute part of the change to possible causes
  • Represents changes in the extreme temperatures by the temporal changes in a parameter of an extreme value distribution
  • Computes regional distributions of the trend in the parameter are computed with and without human influence using constraints from the global optimal fingerprinting analysis
  • Finds that anthropogenic forcings alter the regional distributions, indicating that extremely warm days have become hotter