How Extreme Events in China Would Be Affected by Global Warming—Insights From a Bias-Corrected CMIP6 Ensemble

Abstract

Copyright © 2023 The Authors. In recent years, concurrent climate extreme conditions (i.e., hot-dry, cold-dry, hot-wet, and cold-wet) have led to various unprecedented natural disasters (e.g., floods, landslide, wildfire, droughts, etc.), causing significant damages to human societies and ecosystems. This is especially true for China where many unprecedented natural disasters have been reported due to the recent warming in local climate. In this paper, we focus on the issue of ultra-extreme events (1‰ threshold) and address how future global warming would affect the climate extreme conditions in China. Specifically, to reduce the uncertainties from models, we use a downscaled and bias-corrected CMIP6 ensemble under two continuously-warming scenarios to evaluate the impact of global warming on ultra-extreme events over China. The results show that, under both SSP245 and SSP585 scenarios, extreme hot conditions would become dominant in most regions of China and some regions are likely to experience over 50 extreme hot days at future warming levels. The frequency of extreme cold events is projected to be small. More frequent extreme hot-wet events with concurrence in the same month and year would be expected for China under the continuously-warming scenarios. This is particularly obvious for the west where more than 6 hot-wet months are likely to take place under future warming scenarios. This may imply that more extreme heat waves and flooding events would coincide in the same month or year for China in the future. For univariate ultra-extreme events, both extreme hot events and extreme wet events would drop by above 25% from 2.0°C to 1.5°C global warming level, particularly under the SSP245 scenario. When the global mean temperature is limited to 1.5°C rather than 2°C, the avoided impacts of hot-wet and cold-wet extremes concurring in the same month will be larger than those of dry-related compound extremes. Overall, the results suggest that slowing down global warming can reduce the frequency of concurrent climate extreme conditions in China, highlighting the importance of immediate action toward carbon emission reduction.