Abstract
With the continued global warming, quantifying the risks of human and social-economic exposure to extremely high temperatures is very essential. The simulated extreme high-temperature days (EHTDs) with a maximum temperature higher than 35°C (38°C, 40°C) in Southern China during 1980–1999 and 2080–2099 are analyzed using the NEX-GDDP dataset. By comparing the climatology of the two scenario periods, the multi-model ensemble mean patterns show that EHTDs will greatly increase at the end of the 21st century, and its center at 35°C is projected to shift to Guangxi from Jiangxi. Model diversities are fairly small, and the spread increases with T-level rises. EOF analysis shows that the 100-years warming will impact the southern part greater than the northern part. Trend patterns exhibit comparable results to models, but with a relatively large spread. The population and economy exposure to extremely high temperatures are calculated, showing that they both will experience a large increase in future projected decades. In historical decades, the growth of population and Gross Domestic Product have dominated the increasing exposure risks, but these effects weaken with the T-level increases. In future decades, climate change plays a leading role in affecting the exposure, and its effect strengthens with the T-level increases. For historical to future changes, the dominant contributor to population exposure changes is the climate factor (74%), while substantially 90% contribution to economy exposure changes is dominated by the combined effects of climate and economy growth.
Highlights
Global climate change is already being associated with increases in the incidence of severe and extreme weather, heavy flooding, and wildfires—phenomena that threaten homes, dams, transportation networks, and other facets of human infrastructure, and it has been a social, economical, and environmental matter of great concern across the world
To quantify the future risks of human and economic exposure to extremely high temperature within Southern China, the yearly extreme high-temperature days (EHTDs) during historical scenario period 1980–1999 and RCP8.5 scenario period 2080–2099 calculated from daily maximum temperature data obtained from the NEX-GDDP dataset including 21 CMIP5 models outputs are analyzed from two aspects of climatological changes and trend changes
The corresponding population and GDP densities of A2r scenario data from the IIASA GGI Scenario Database Version 2.0 are used to calculate the population and economy exposure to extremely high temperatures, and the possible physical processes are discussed according to the results of factor analysis
Summary
Global climate change is already being associated with increases in the incidence of severe and extreme weather, heavy flooding, and wildfires—phenomena that threaten homes, dams, transportation networks, and other facets of human infrastructure, and it has been a social, economical, and environmental matter of great concern across the world. Temperatures are increasing on a global scale revealed by multisource observational data and scenarios simulated data (Sillmann et al, 2013; Blumberg, 2014; Zuo et al, 2015; Zhao and Zhou, 2019; Xu et al, 2020), but at the regional level, the story gets complicated. The fraction of land area with extremely hot summers in China is believed to increase much greater than for the global land surface as a whole (Leng et al, 2016). Chou et al (2019) found that during 2000–2015, the increasing trend in droughts has shifted gradually from north to south, and the increasing trend in extreme precipitation has shifted gradually from south to north
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