Projected changes in extreme warm and cold temperatures in China from 1.5 to 5°C global warming

Abstract

AbstractLinking regional extreme temperature changes to global warming levels is important for understanding the impacts of global emission targets on regional climate. Here, we investigate how the temperature extremes in China change with different global warming levels using large ensemble runs from Canadian Earth System Model version 2. With the global mean near‐surface temperature increasing from 1.5 to 5°C above the preindustrial level, the absolute intensity of the warmest and coldest temperatures in China will change linearly, while the percentile‐based frequency of warm and cold temperatures will change nonlinearly. All the changes in the intensity and the frequency show clear regional differences, with the most obvious changes observed in northeastern China. The probability distribution functions (PDFs) for the intensity indices show clear shifts but with little change in shape, while the PDFs for the frequency indices show changes in both position and shape. Quantified analyses of risk ratio show that the risk changes in the frequency of temperature extremes will be larger than those for the intensity indices. The changes in the nighttime extremes are faster than those in the daytime extremes. The rarer the event is, the larger the change in the risk ratio. At the 2°C warming level, the cold days and nights with return periods of 5, 10, and 50 years in the current climate will become almost disappeared. At the 3°C level and beyond, the once‐in‐5‐year, 10‐year and 50‐year warm events in the current climate will occur every year.