Journal article
Observed Emergence of the Climate Change Signal: From the Familiar to the Unknown
E Hawkins, D Frame, L Harrington, M Joshi, A King, M Rojas, R Sutton
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS | AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION | Published : 2020
DOI: 10.1029/2019GL086259
Abstract
Changes in climate are usually considered in terms of trends or differences over time. However, for many impacts requiring adaptation, it is the amplitude of the change relative to the local amplitude of climate variability which is more relevant. Here, we develop the concept of “signal-to-noise” in observations of local temperature, highlighting that many regions are already experiencing a climate which would be “unknown” by late 19th century standards. The emergence of observed temperature changes over both land and ocean is clearest in tropical regions, in contrast to the regions of largest change which are in the northern extratropics—broadly consistent with climate model simulations. Si..
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Grants
Awarded by European Union
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Awarded by UK Natural Environment Research Council
Awarded by FONDAP-CONICYT
Awarded by Whakahura project - Endeavour Fund
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Nicola Maher for providing the MPI large ensemble data. We also thank the anonymous reviewer, Flavio Lehner, and Richard Betts for useful comments which helped improve the paper. E. H. and R. S. were supported by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, and E. H. was funded by the ERA4CS INDECIS project with funding from the European Union Grant 690462. A. D. K. was funded by the Australian Research Council (DE180100638). M. J. is funded by UK Natural Environment Research Council Grants NE/S004645/1 and NE/N018486/1. M. R. acknowledges funding from FONDAP-CONICYT 15110009. D. J. F. and L. J. H. were supported by the Whakahura project funded by the Endeavour Fund (Contract RTVU1906). The data sets used in this paper are freely available online: Berkeley Earth (http://berkeleyearth.org), Cowtan & Way (https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~kdc3/papers/coverage2013/series.html), HadCRUT4 (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/), GISTEMP (https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/), NOAA GlobTemp (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/noaa-merged-land-oceanglobal-surface-temperature-analysis-noaaglobaltemp-v5), GPCC (https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/gpcc/gpcc.html), HadUK-Grid (http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/4dc8450d889a491ebb20e724debe2dfb), andMPI Large Ensemble (https://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/grand-ensemble/).The Oxford Radcliffe Observatory temperature data is available online (https://figshare.com/articles/OXFORD_England_Monthly_and_ annual_mean_temperatures_1814_to_ date_xlsx/10322015).