Human influence on daily temperature variability over land

Abstract

Changes in day-to-day (daily) temperature variability have implications for the health of humans and other species and industries such as agriculture. The strongest historical changes in daily temperature variability are decreases in the northern high latitudes annually and in all seasons except summer. Additionally, daily temperature variability has increased in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes during summer and over tropical and Southern Hemisphere land areas. These patterns are projected to continue with additional warming. We conduct a formal detection and attribution analysis, finding the global spatio-temporal changes in daily temperature standard deviation annually and for all seasons except boreal summer are attributable to anthropogenic forcing. Human influence is also detected in some individual 20-degree latitude bands, including the northern high latitudes. Attribution results are generally robust to different methodological choices and this provides confidence in projected changes in daily temperature variability with continued anthropogenic warming.

Keywords

• daily temperature variability
• attribution
• human influence
• climate change