Short-tailed Temperature Distributions over North America and Implications for Future Changes in Extremes

Paul Loikith and J. David Neelin

Geophys. Res. Lett., 42, 8577-8585, doi:10.1002/2015GL065602. Group page.

Abstract. Some regions of North America exhibit non-normal temperature distributions. Shorter-than-Gaussian warm tails are a special subset of these cases, with potentially meaningful implications for future changes in extreme warm temperatures under anthropogenic global warming. Locations exhibiting shorter-than-Gaussian warm tails would experience a greater increase in extreme warm temperature exceedances than a location with a Gaussian or long warm side tail under a simple uniform warm shift in the distribution. Here we identify regions exhibiting such behavior over North America and demonstrate the effect of a simple warm shift on changes in extreme warm temperature exceedances. Some locations exceed the 95th percentile of the original distribution by greater than 40% of the time after this uniform shift. While the manner in which distributions change under global warming may be more complex than a simple shift, these results provide an observational baseline for climate model evaluation.

Citation:
Loikith, P. C., and J. D. Neelin, 2015: Short-tailed Temperature Distributions over North America and Implications for 1 Future Changes in Extremes. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42, 8577-8585, doi:10.1002/2015GL065602.


Acknowledgments. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and part was funded by NSF AGS-1102838/AGS-1540518 and NOAA NA14OAR4310274 (JDN) and NASA NCA 11-NCA11-0028 (PCL). Temperature data was obtained at http://dx.doi.org/10.5065/D6PR7SZF. We thank Joyce Meyerson for computational and graphical assistance.


An edited version of this paper was published by AGU. Copyright (2015) American Geophysical Union. To view the published open abstract, go to AGU Journal Link.