TY - JOUR
T1 - Human contribution to the record-breaking June and July 2019 heatwaves in Western Europe
AU - Vautard, Robert
AU - van Aalst, M.
AU - Boucher, Olivier
AU - Drouin, Agathe
AU - Haustein, Karsten
AU - Kreienkamp, Frank
AU - van Oldenborgh, Geert Jan
AU - Otto, Friederike E.L.
AU - Ribes, Aurélien
AU - Robin, Yoann
AU - Schneider, Michel
AU - Soubeyroux, Jean Michel
AU - Stott, Peter
AU - Seneviratne, Sonia I.
AU - Vogel, Martha M.
AU - Wehner, Michael
PY - 2020/8/28
Y1 - 2020/8/28
N2 - Two extreme heatwaves hit Western Europe in the summer of 2019, with historical records broken by more than a degree in many locations, and significant societal impacts, including excess mortality of several thousand people. The extent to which human influence has played a role in the occurrence of these events has been of large interest to scientists, media and decision makers. However, the outstanding nature of these events poses challenges for physical and statistical modeling. Using an unprecedented number of climate model ensembles and statistical extreme value modeling, we demonstrate that these short and intense events would have had extremely small odds in the absence of human-induced climate change, and equivalently frequent events would have been 1.5 °C to 3 °C colder. For instance, in France and in The Netherlands, the July 3-day heatwave has a 50-150-year return period in the current climate and a return period of more than 1000 years without human forcing. The increase in the intensities is larger than the global warming by a factor 2 to 3. Finally, we note that the observed trends are much larger than those in current climate models.
AB - Two extreme heatwaves hit Western Europe in the summer of 2019, with historical records broken by more than a degree in many locations, and significant societal impacts, including excess mortality of several thousand people. The extent to which human influence has played a role in the occurrence of these events has been of large interest to scientists, media and decision makers. However, the outstanding nature of these events poses challenges for physical and statistical modeling. Using an unprecedented number of climate model ensembles and statistical extreme value modeling, we demonstrate that these short and intense events would have had extremely small odds in the absence of human-induced climate change, and equivalently frequent events would have been 1.5 °C to 3 °C colder. For instance, in France and in The Netherlands, the July 3-day heatwave has a 50-150-year return period in the current climate and a return period of more than 1000 years without human forcing. The increase in the intensities is larger than the global warming by a factor 2 to 3. Finally, we note that the observed trends are much larger than those in current climate models.
KW - Climate change
KW - Extreme event attribution
KW - Heat wave
KW - ITC-ISI-JOURNAL-ARTICLE
KW - ITC-GOLD
U2 - 10.1088/1748-9326/aba3d4
DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/aba3d4
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85092301618
SN - 1748-9318
VL - 15
SP - 1
EP - 9
JO - Environmental research letters
JF - Environmental research letters
IS - 9
M1 - 094077
ER -