Science Source

The Role of Human Activity in the Recent Warming of Extremely Warm Daytime Temperatures

Presents an optimal fingerprinting analysis that also detects the contributions of external forcings to recent changes in extremely warm days using nonstationary extreme value theory
The authors’ analysis is the first that attempts to partition the observed change in warm daytime extremes between its anthropogenic and natural components and hence attribute part of the change to possible causes
Represents changes in the extreme temperatures by the temporal changes in a parameter of an extreme value distribution
Computes regional distributions of the trend in the parameter are computed with and without human influence using constraints from the global optimal fingerprinting analysis
Finds that anthropogenic forcings alter the regional distributions, indicating that extremely warm days have become hotter