A number of studies have indicated that the probability of longer duration and more frequent heat waves is increased by climate change. The impact on cold extremes such as the one experienced in many parts of the US over the 2014–2015 winter is, however, less clear.
To address this Yang Gao from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA, and co-workers examined changes in the projected occurrence of cold air outbreaks (CAOs) in North America using a multi-model ensemble of global climate simulations (including wind-chill temperature effects) combined with high-resolution regional climate simulations that account for the potential impacts of snow cover.
They find an overall reduction in CAO duration across North America, but with proportionally smaller reductions from western Canada to the upper mid-western US. CAO changes are explained largely by mean warming, but the decrease in temperature variance and changes in skewness, a statistical moment strongly regulated by atmospheric blockings, have clear impacts on the spatial pattern of CAO changes. Taken together the multi-model projections show that cold extremes can be expected to continue under climate change with the most extreme CAO events still having the potential to occur.
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Brown, A. North American cold spells. Nature Clim Change 5, 515 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2674
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2674
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