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DETECTION AND ATTRIBUTION

Human fingerprint in global weather

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 15–16 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 09 January 2020

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An anthropogenic fingerprint has been detected in long-term climate trends, but distinguishing human-induced change from natural variability in day-to-day weather remains a challenge. Research now finds that a human influence is discernible in global patterns of daily temperature and moisture.

Identifying the causes of climate change is fundamental to reliable climate projections1, and central to this challenge is isolating anthropogenic signals from natural variability2. So far, detection work has focused on longer-term climate trends3. Climate change also manifests in daily weather, and attributing the likelihood of a single extreme event to climate change is now possible4. A natural next step is to ask whether we can detect a human fingerprint on daily weather patterns more generally. Yes, says a study in Nature Climate Change by Sebastian Sippel and co-authors5. Here, the authors use a measure of spatial similarity to conclude that daily fields of global temperature and moisture are distinguishable from natural variability, providing evidence for an anthropogenic fingerprint on global weather patterns.

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Fig. 1: A snapshot of global weather.

Change history

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  1. Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Korea

    Seung-Ki Min

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  1. Seung-Ki Min
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Correspondence to Seung-Ki Min.

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Min, SK. Human fingerprint in global weather. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 15–16 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0670-y

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