2024/11/26 by Kai Kornhuber, Samuel Bartusek, Richard Seager +2 · 2 voices · 63 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Atmospheric sciences #Climate change #Climate model #Climate variability and models #Climatology #Ecology #Environmental science #Extreme weather #Geography #Geology #Global warming #Greenhouse gas #Harm #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations
paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.2411258121
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(49), e2411258121 (National Academy of Sciences)
openalex publication_date 2024/11/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Multiple recent record-shattering weather events raise questions about the adequacy of climate models to effectively predict and prepare for unprecedented climate impacts on human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Here, we show that extreme heat in several regions globally is increasing significantly and faster in magnitude than what state-of-the-art climate models have predicted under present warming even after accounting for their regional summer background warming. Across all global land area, models underestimate positive trends exceeding 0.5 °C per decade in widening of the upper tail of extreme surface temperature distributions by a factor of four compared to reanalysis data and exhibit a lower fraction of significantly increasing trends overall. To a lesser degree, models also underestimate observed strong trends of contraction of the upper tails in some areas, while moderate trends are well reproduced in a global perspective. Our results highlight the need to better understand and model the drivers of extreme heat and to rapidly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions to avoid further harm from unexpected weather events.