Changing frequency of occurrence of extreme seasonal temperatures under global warming

Abstract

Using a multi‐model multi‐scenario ensemble of integrations made for the forthcoming fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the frequency of occurrence of extreme seasonal temperatures at the end of the 21st Century is estimated. In this study an extreme temperature is defined as lying above the 95 percentile of the simulated temperature distribution for 20th Century climate. The model probability of extreme warm seasons is heterogeneous over the globe and rises to over 90% in large parts of the tropics. This would correspond to an average return period of such anomalous warm seasons of almost one year. The reliability of these results is assessed using the bounding box technique, previously used to quantify the reliability of seasonal climate forecasts. It is shown that the dramatic increase in extreme warm seasons arises from the combined effect of a shift and a broadening of the temperature distributions.