Observed Global Changes in Sector-Relevant Climate Extremes Indices—An Extension to HadEX3

Global gridded data sets of observed extremes indices underpin assessments of changes in climate extremes. However, similar efforts to enable the assessment of indices relevant to different sectors of society have been missing. Here we present a data set of sector-specific indices, based on daily station data, that extends the HadEX3 data set of climate extremes indices. These additional indices, which can be used singly or in combinations, have been recommended by the World Meteorological Organization and are intended to empower decision makers in different sectors with accurate historical information about how sector-relevant measures of the climate are changing, especially in regions where in situ daily temperature and rainfall data are hard to come by. The annual and/or monthly indices have been interpolated on to a 1.875° × 1.25° longitude-latitude grid for 1901–2018. We show changes in globally-averaged time series of these indices in comparison with reanalysis products. Changes in temperature-based indices are consistent with global scale warming, with days with Tmax > 30°C (TXge30) increasing virtually everywhere with potential impacts on crop fertility. At the other end of the scale, the number of days with Tmin < −2°C (TNltm2) are reducing, decreasing potential damage from frosts. Changes in heat wave characteristics show increases in the number, duration and intensity of these extreme events in most places. The gridded netCDF files and, where possible, the underlying station indices are available from
All software, with the exception of Climpact2 which is in R (Ihaka & Gentleman, 1996; R Core Team, 2013), have been written in Python 3 (Python Software Foundation, 2013). The dependencies and interplay between them have been controlled using a Rose (Shin et al., 2019)/Cylc suite (Oliver et al., 2018). RJHD was supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by DSIT and by the UK-China Research & Innovation Partnership Fund through the Met Office Climate Science for Service Partnership (CSSP) China under the International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF), and thanks Kate Willett, Lizzie Good and Nick Rayner for useful discussions and comments. LVA was supported by Australian Research Council Grant CE170100023. MGD is grateful for funding by the Horizon 2020 LANDMARC project (grant agreement no. 869367). JM was supported by the RED-CLIMA (Red Española e Iberoamericana sobre Variabilidad Climática y Servicios Climáticos en Ecosistemas Terrestres y Marinos: RED-CLIMA) Project, under Grant INCCLO0023 from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas LINCGLOBAL CSIC from Spain. Additional funding comes from National Institute of Science and Technology for Climate Change Phase 2 under CNPq Grant 465501/2014-1; FAPESP Grant 2014/50848-9; and the National Coordination for Higher Education and Training (CAPES) Grants 88887.136402–00INCT. Data from Southeast Asia (excl. Indonesia) was supported by work on using ClimPACT2 during the Second Workshop on ASEAN Regional Climate Data, Analysis and Projections (ARCDAP-2), 25–29 March 2019, Singapore, jointly funded by Meteorological Service Singapore and WMO through the Canada-Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) initiative. Daily data for Mexico were provided by the Servicio Meteorológico Nacional (SMN) of Comisión Nacional del Agua (CONAGUA). The Pacific data is associated with an ET-SCI workshop in Fiji over 7–11 December 2015 funded by Environment Canada. Additional detail available via https
Peer Reviewed
"Article signat per 29 autors/es: Robert J. H. Dunn, Nicholas Herold, Lisa V. Alexander, Markus G. Donat, Rob Allan, Margot Bador, Manola Brunet, Vincent Cheng, Wan Maisarah Wan Ibadullah, Muhammad Khairul Izzat Bin Ibrahim, Andries Kruger, Hisayuki Kubota, Tanya J. R. Lippmann, Jose Marengo, Sifiso Mbatha, Simon McGree, Sandile Ngwenya, Jose Daniel Pabon Caicedo, Andrea Ramos, Jim Salinger, Gerard van der Schrier, Arvind Srivastava, Blair Trewin, Ricardo Vásquez Yáñez, Jorge Vazquez-Aguirre, Claudia Villaroel Jiménez, Russ Vose, Mohd Noor’Arifin Bin Hj Yussof, Xuebin Zhang"
Postprint (published version)