Abstract
Extremes of weather and climate can have devastating effects on human society and the environment1,2. Understanding past changes in the characteristics of such events, including recent increases in the intensity of heavy precipitation events over a large part of the Northern Hemisphere land area3,4,5, is critical for reliable projections of future changes. Given that atmospheric water-holding capacity is expected to increase roughly exponentially with temperature—and that atmospheric water content is increasing in accord with this theoretical expectation6,7,8,9,10,11—it has been suggested that human-influenced global warming may be partly responsible for increases in heavy precipitation3,5,7. Because of the limited availability of daily observations, however, most previous studies have examined only the potential detectability of changes in extreme precipitation through model–model comparisons12,13,14,15. Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas. These results are based on a comparison of observed and multi-model simulated changes in extreme precipitation over the latter half of the twentieth century analysed with an optimal fingerprinting technique. Changes in extreme precipitation projected by models, and thus the impacts of future changes in extreme precipitation, may be underestimated because models seem to underestimate the observed increase in heavy precipitation with warming16.
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Acknowledgements
We thank N. Gillett and B. Yu for comments, M. Wehner for provision of CCSM3 data, and J. Penner and M. Sugiyama for discussion. We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP's) Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model data set. Support for this data set is provided by the Office of Science, US Department of Energy. We acknowledge the support of the International Detection and Attribution Group (IDAG) by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office. S.-K.M. was supported by the Canadian International Polar Year (IPY) programme. G.C.H. was supported by the NSF (grant ATM-0296007).
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S.-K.M. carried out analysis. X.Z., F.W.Z. and G.C.H. contributed to the analysis. All authors discussed the results and contributed to writing the paper.
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This file contains Supplementary Text 1-9, additional references, Supplementary Tables 1-3 and Supplementary Figures 1-17 with legends. (PDF 9096 kb)
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Min, SK., Zhang, X., Zwiers, F. et al. Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes. Nature 470, 378–381 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09763
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09763
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A Jagadeesh
Excellent article.
Yes. Human activities are also contributing to extreme weather conditions.
In the context of climate variation, anthropogenic factors are human activities that change the environment. In some cases the chain of causality of human influence on the climate is direct and unambiguous (for example, the effects of irrigation on local humidity), while in other instances it is less clear. Various hypotheses for human-induced climate change have been argued for many years. Presently the scientific consensus on climate change is that human activity is very likely the cause for the rapid increase in global average temperatures over the past several decades. Consequently, the debate has largely shifted onto ways to reduce further human impact and to find ways to adapt to change that has already occurred.
Of most concern in these anthropogenic factors is the increase in CO2 levels due to emissions from fossil fuel combustion, followed by aerosols (particulate matter in the atmosphere) and cement manufacture. Other factors, including land use, ozone depletion, animal agriculture and deforestation, are also of concern in the roles they play – both separately and in conjunction with other factors – in affecting climate, microclimate, and measures of climate variables(Source: Wikipedia).
Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore (AP), India.
zhaomin Wang
I would urge the authors to re-think about the relationship between their RX1D and RX5D and global warming. I suggest that land surface air temperature averaged over the northern hemisphere should be plotted. There was a cooling trend between 1950 and 1970, and a warming trend after 1970. But, both RX1D and RX5D went up between 1950 and 1970. I can only guess that the qualities of RX1D and RX5D data could be poor in the early time, a reason for the authors to get an upward trends in RX1D and RX5D between 1950 and 1970. So, the detection of human contribution to more-intense rainfall should be carried out much more carefully.