Journal article
Comparison of methods: Attributing the 2014 record European temperatures to human influences
P Uhe, FEL Otto, K Haustein, GJ van Oldenborgh, AD King, DCH Wallom, MR Allen, H Cullen
Geophysical Research Letters | AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION | Published : 2016
DOI: 10.1002/2016GL069568
Abstract
The year 2014 broke the record for the warmest yearly average temperature in Europe. Attributing how much this was due to anthropogenic climate change and how much it was due to natural variability is a challenging question but one that is important to address. In this study, we compare four event attribution methods. We look at the risk ratio (RR) associated with anthropogenic climate change for this event, over the whole European region, as well as its spatial distribution. Each method shows a very strong anthropogenic influence on the event over Europe. However, the magnitude of the RR strongly depends on the definition of the event and the method used. Across Europe, attribution over lar..
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Awarded by European Commission
Funding Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all of the participants who computed simulations for climateprediction. net. We would like to thank our colleagues at the Oxford e-Research Centre: A. Bowery, M. Rashid, and S. Sparrow for their technical expertise. We would like to thank the Met Office Hadley Centre PRECIS team for their technical and scientific support for the development and application of weather@home. Andrew King was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (grant CE 110001028) and the NCI National Facility in Australia. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. For CMIP the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison provides coordinating support and led development of software infrastructure in partnership with the Global Organization for Earth System Science Portals. The EUCLEIA project was funded by the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/20072013) under grant agreement 607085. The data for this paper are available by request from the corresponding author. We acknowledge the E-OBS data set from the EU-FP6 project ENSEMBLES (http://ensembles-eu.metoffice.com) and the data providers in the ECA&D project (http://www.ecad.eu).