Increase of extreme events in a warming world
Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved September 27, 2011 (received for review February 2, 2011)
Correction
February 29, 2012
Abstract
We develop a theoretical approach to quantify the effect of long-term trends on the expected number of extremes in generic time series, using analytical solutions and Monte Carlo simulations. We apply our method to study the effect of warming trends on heat records. We find that the number of record-breaking events increases approximately in proportion to the ratio of warming trend to short-term standard deviation. Short-term variability thus decreases the number of heat extremes, whereas a climatic warming increases it. For extremes exceeding a predefined threshold, the dependence on the warming trend is highly nonlinear. We further find that the sum of warm plus cold extremes increases with any climate change, whether warming or cooling. We estimate that climatic warming has increased the number of new global-mean temperature records expected in the last decade from 0.1 to 2.8. For July temperature in Moscow, we estimate that the local warming trend has increased the number of records expected in the past decade fivefold, which implies an approximate 80% probability that the 2010 July heat record would not have occurred without climate warming.
Acknowledgments.
We thank Mahé Perrette and Stijn Ruiter for statistical support, Ricarda Winkelmann for discussions about the analytical solutions, and Alex Robinson for discussions on Moscow station data. We thank four anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks on an earlier version of this manuscript.
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Cover image: Pictured is an adult male silkmoth, Bombyx mori, whose antennae sense female sex pheromones to evoke courtship behavior. Although females secrete a mixture of the pheromones bombykol and bombykal, only bombykol specifically elicits male mating behavior. The mechanism controlling the male moth’s pheromone sensing system has remained unclear. Tsuguru Fujii et al. found that disruption of the gene, Bmacj6, which encodes a transcription factor, triggered a shift in pheromone preference, whereby mutant male moths are attracted by bombykal and no longer respond to bombykol. The findings suggest that mutation in the gene for a transcription factor—rather than mutations in the genes encoding pheromone receptors—may have played an important role in determining the sex pheromone preferences of males. See the article by Fujii et al. on pages 18038–18043. Image courtesy of Hiroaki Abe.
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Submission history
Published online: October 24, 2011
Published in issue: November 1, 2011
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Acknowledgments
We thank Mahé Perrette and Stijn Ruiter for statistical support, Ricarda Winkelmann for discussions about the analytical solutions, and Alex Robinson for discussions on Moscow station data. We thank four anonymous reviewers for their constructive remarks on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Notes
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Authors
Competing Interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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