Temporally compound heat wave events and global warming: An emerging hazard
This study examines the temporal structure of heat waves having widely varying substantial human impact, with many featuring a compound structure of hot days interspersed with cooler breaks. In contrast, many heat wave definitions employed by meteorologists include a continuous threshold-exceedance duration criterion.
This paper further examines the hazard of these diverse sequences of extreme heat in the present, and their change with global warming, it defines compound heat waves to include those periods with additional hot days following short breaks in heat wave duration.
The research then applies these definitions to analyze daily temperature data from observations, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory global climate model simulations of the past and projected climate, and synthetically generated time series. This demonstrate that compound heat waves will constitute a greater proportion of heat wave hazard as the climate warms and suggest an explanation for this phenomenon.
This result implies that in order to limit heat-related mortality and morbidity with global warming, there is a need to consider added vulnerability caused by the compounding of heat waves.
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