Duration of heat waves accelerating faster than global warming
Duration of heat waves accelerating faster than global warming
The longest and rarest heat waves — which can last for weeks — show the greatest increase in frequency.
- Each fraction of a degree of warming will have a bigger impact than the last on lengthening heat waves, with the most extreme heat waves lengthening the most.
- Tropical regions will see larger changes than temperate regions, and summer heat waves will lengthen more than winter warm spells.
- Researchers led by UCLA and the Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Santiago, Chile, developed an equation that has the flexibility to analyze one region or to gain additional broad insight by analyzing multiple regions as a whole.
The paper is here
When I first started taking climatology back in the day, I thought it a bit paradoxical that profs kept going on about how global warming would lead to more extreme weather when, on a first principles basis at least, I would've thought it should lessen weather variability. Anthropogenic warming is an insulating effect, and that should tend to even out conditions across the planet, just as insulating your home should reduce drafts and what not.
I guess my problem was that I had it in my head that greater variability = more chance to hit extremes, and we were going the other way. But the way things are playing out, it's less variability that is giving us what we view as aberrant weather. That heat dome that never leaves or that storm system that parks itself over your head for days on end. We get too much of one thing because the weather systems are actually becoming less chaotic and getting stuck in holding patterns for longer than is healthy.