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Conspicuous temperature extremes over Southeast Asia: seasonal variations under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming

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Abstract

Guided by the Paris Agreement, the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C reported potential risks of climate change at different global warming levels (GWLs). To provide fundamental information on future temperature extremes over Southeast Asia (SEA), projected changes in temperature extreme indices are evaluated for different seasons at 1.5 °C and 2 °C GWLs against the historical reference period of 1976–2005 based on the ensemble of CORDEX simulations. Results show that the temperature indices increase significantly across the Indochina Peninsula and Maritime Continent at both GWLs except for decreasing daily temperature range (DTR) in the dry season, with more pronounced magnitudes at 2 °C GWL. Moreover, the regionally averaged ensemble medians of the indices show various changes over different subregions. At 1.5 °C and 2 °C GWLs, most pronounced increases of threshold indices. i.e. summer days (SU) and tropical nights (TR), are projected in Sumatra and Sulawesi for both wet and dry seasons. The warm spell duration (WSDI) increases generally, with strongest magnitudes for Sumatra and Sulawesi (Philippines and Sulawesi) in the wet (dry) season. On the other hand, significant increases of warm days and nights can also be observed at 2 °C GWL compared to 1.5 °C, particularly in the dry season, suggesting the high sensitivity of temperature extremes over the SEA. The projected potentially conspicuous temperature extremes under global warming of 1.5 °C and 2 °C primarily concentrate on the densely populated coastal regions of the main islands, showing the necessity of restricting global warming to 1.5 °C aiming at the eradication and reduction of regional climate stress for the human system in the developing countries over the SEA.

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Acknowledgments

Three anonymous reviewers are thanked for their constructive comments that greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. We are grateful to WCRP CORDEX, ECMWF, ETCCDI, the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 1) for their data and resources.

Funding

Joint financial support provided by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2017YFC1502002, 2018YFC1505702, and 2018YFC1506104), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41805056 and 41776002), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20060501), the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning (A1-2048-18-0001), the Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. KYCX17_0875), the Scientific Research Fund of Sichuan Provincial Education Department (18ZB0112), the Open Research Fund Program of KLME, NUIST (KLME201809), and the China Scholarship Council (Grant Nos. 201808510009 and 201608320193).

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  1. Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster, Ministry of Education (KLME) / Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters (CIC-FEMD), Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, China

    Shoupeng Zhu, Yi Fan, Ling Zhang & Xiefei Zhi

  2. School of Atmospheric Sciences / Plateau Atmosphere and Environment Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province/Joint Laboratory of Climate and Environment Change, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, China

    Fei Ge

  3. Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

    Shoupeng Zhu, Fei Ge & Klaus Fraedrich

  4. Nansen-Zhu International Research Centre, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yi Fan

  5. Meteorological Institute, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Frank Sielmann

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Zhu, S., Ge, F., Fan, Y. et al. Conspicuous temperature extremes over Southeast Asia: seasonal variations under 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming. Climatic Change 160, 343–360 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02640-1

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