Detection of anthropogenic influence on a summertime heat stress index

Thomas R. Knutson () and Jeffrey J. Ploshay
Additional contact information
Thomas R. Knutson: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory / NOAA
Jeffrey J. Ploshay: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory / NOAA

Climatic Change, 2016, vol. 138, issue 1, No 3, 25-39

Abstract: Abstract One of the most consequential impacts of anthropogenic warming on humans may be increased heat stress, combining temperature and humidity effects. Here we examine whether there are now detectable changes in summertime heat stress over land regions. As a heat stress metric we use a simplified wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) index. Observed trends in WBGT (1973–2012) are compared to trends from CMIP5 historical simulations (eight-model ensemble) using either anthropogenic and natural forcing agents combined or natural forcings alone. Our analysis suggests that there has been a detectable anthropogenic increase in mean summertime heat stress since 1973, both globally and in most land regions analyzed. A detectable increase is found over a larger fraction of land for WBGT than for temperature, as WBGT summertime means have lower interannual variability than surface temperature at gridbox scales. Notably, summertime WBGT over land has continued increasing in recent years--consistent with climate models--despite the apparent ‘hiatus’ in global warming and despite a decreasing tendency in observed relative humidity over land since the late 1990s.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-016-1708-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:138:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s10584-016-1708-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-016-1708-z

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().