Climate Change Alters Daily Weather Patterns
As the Earth gets warmer, it changes how the weather behaves every day. But this change doesn’t happen the same way everywhere. Over the last ten years, scientists have gathered enough information and technology to understand how much the warming climate affects the weather on any given day or for a few days.
A group of scientists called the World Weather Attribution team has been leading this research. They started their work in 2015, led by Dr. Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Dr. Friederike Otto. They work with scientists from around the world to study big events like heatwaves, heavy rain, fires, and droughts.
They try to figure out how much climate change played a role in causing these events. Sadly, Dr. van Oldenborgh passed away in 2021, and now Dr. Otto, who works at Imperial College London, is leading the team.
The team looks at data from a specific weather event, historical weather patterns, and computer simulations of the climate. They compare the climate before and after it started getting warmer. This helps them figure out how much the warming climate affected the event.
After a big event, the team looks at old records to see if something similar happened before. Then they run many simulations of the climate to see what would happen with and without the warming of the last 50 years.
Sometimes, they don’t find much of a difference. But most times, they see a clear effect. For example, in North America, they found that the warming climate made extreme fire weather conditions in eastern Canada more than twice as likely in 2023. This means fires could spread faster and farther than they could have a few decades ago, no matter how they started.
The team is also studying other parts of the world, where the effects of climate change are stronger and last longer. A recent study showed that the drought in the Amazon River Basin is now ten times more likely because of our warmer climate. And the drought affecting agriculture there is now 30 times more likely. These studies show that while climate change might not be the main cause of an extreme event, it makes it much more likely to happen.
On a more regular basis, scientists can use the same idea to understand daily temperatures. By looking at all the weather data from a place, they can figure out how often a certain temperature happens during a specific time of the year. For example, in cities like St. Louis or Washington, having a high temperature of 85 degrees in July is common. But having highs of 65 or 105 is rare.
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