Abstract
Increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves (HWs) in a warming climate exert catastrophic impacts on human society and natural environment. However, spatiotemporal variations of HW and their driving factors still remain obscure, especially for HW changes over Eurasia, the region with the largest population of the world. Here we provide a systematic investigation of the HW changes over Eurasia and quantify the contributions of different natural and anthropogenic factors to these changes. Increasing frequency, duration and intensity of HW are observed in most parts of Eurasia, and the occurrence of the first HW event tends to be earlier as well, especially in Europe, East Asia, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean region. These intensified HW activities are particularly stronger and more widespread after 1990 s. The spatial pattern of the increasing HW trend is closely tied to the interdecadal changes of sea surface temperature in the North Pacific. More intense hot airmass convection, atmospheric circulation obstruction over the Mediterranean region and the enhanced Mongolian high hinders the southward movement of cold air and cold and wet airmass exchange. Further analyses suggest that the intensifying Eurasian HW tendency is a combined result of both climate change and human activities. Overall, the fractional contributions of climate warming, urbanization, standardized precipitation evaporation index, and Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation to the frequency of Eurasian HWs are 30%, 25%, 21% and 24%, respectively. It is also suggested that the relative influential rate of different driving factors for HW varies over time and differs in different areas.
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Data availability
The daily gridded land surface air temperature from Berkeley Earth were acquired from their website at http://berkeleyearth.org/data. The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis dataset can be available from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ncep.reanalysis.pressure.html. Nino3.4 index was obtained from http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Data/nino34.long.anom.data. Southern Oscillation Index was obtained from https://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/soihtm1.shtml. IOD index https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/DMI. North Atlantic Oscillation https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/pna/nao.shtml. Arctic Oscillation index https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao.shtml. Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation http://www.psl.noaa.gov/data/timeseries/AMO. Pacific Decadal Oscillation https://psl.noaa.gov/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/PDO. GHCN_CAMS 2 m-grid surface air temperature dataset can be available from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.ghcncams.html. The monthly gridded precipitation from GPCC were acquired from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcc.html. The monthly downward shortwave radiation, Aerosol Optical Depth, surface albedo and soil water data were from the MERRA-2 reanalysis dataset released from https://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/. The SPEI03 index from CSIC can be available from http://spei.csic.es/database.html. The GAIA data were obtained from http://data.ess.tsinghua.edu.cn/gaia.html/.
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This research has been supported by the National Key R&D Program of China grant No. 2019YFA0606900 and the National Science Foundation of China Grant No. 41771536.
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Wang, G., Zhang, Q., Luo, M. et al. Fractional contribution of global warming and regional urbanization to intensifying regional heatwaves across Eurasia. Clim Dyn 59, 1521–1537 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-06054-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-06054-7