Abstract
The ensemble results of CMIP5 climate models that applied the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios have been used to investigate climate change and temperature extremes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Uncertainty evaluation of climate projections indicates good model agreement for temperature but much less for precipitation. Results imply that climate warming in the MENA is strongest in summer while elsewhere it is typically stronger in winter. The summertime warming extends the thermal low at the surface from South Asia across the Middle East over North Africa, as the hot desert climate intensifies and becomes more extreme. Observations and model calculations of the recent past consistently show increasing heat extremes, which are projected to accelerate in future. The number of warm days and nights may increase sharply. On average in the MENA, the maximum temperature during the hottest days in the recent past was about 43 °C, which could increase to about 46 °C by the middle of the century and reach almost 50 °C by the end of the century, the latter according to the RCP8.5 (business-as-usual) scenario. This will have important consequences for human health and society.
Highlights
Even if climate change in the 21st century will be limited to a global mean temperature increase of 2 °C relative to pre-industrial times, warming over land is typically stronger than over the oceans and extreme temperatures in many regions can increase well beyond 2 °C (Seneviratne et al 2016)
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are expected to be Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users
Motivated by the demand for information about regional climate trends, we present projected changes in summertime hot weather conditions in the MENA during the 21st century based on the ensemble output of climate models that participated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, CMIP5 (Taylor et al 2012; Sillmann et al 2013a, 2013b)
Summary
Even if climate change in the 21st century will be limited to a global mean temperature increase of 2 °C relative to pre-industrial times, warming over land is typically stronger than over the oceans and extreme temperatures in many regions can increase well beyond 2 °C (Seneviratne et al 2016). Zittis et al (2015) showed that the probability density distributions of daytime maximum temperatures in the warm temperate climate regime north of the Mediterranean are typically wider than in the arid areas to the south In the latter case the extreme values are comparatively close to the median and mean of the maximum temperature distribution, so that even a moderate rate of warming can lead to the exceeding of heat wave thresholds. We evaluate CMIP5 model uncertainties for the MENA by comparing with observations, and based on the robustness metric (Knutti and Sedlacek 2012), and show that the models consistently project strong temperature changes whereas precipitation projections are much less consistent This rationalizes the present focus on temperature extremes, whereas for. For the latter we refer to the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment framework for the region, MENA-CORDEX (Giorgi et al 2009; Zittis et al 2014a; Almazroui 2015)
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