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No pause in the increase of hot temperature extremes

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A Correction to this article was published on 25 April 2014

This article has been updated

Observational data show a continued increase of hot extremes over land during the so-called global warming hiatus. This tendency is greater for the most extreme events and thus more relevant for impacts than changes in global mean temperature.

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Figure 1: Time series of land area affected by exceedance of hot temperature extremes.
Figure 2: Time series of temperature anomalies for hot extremes over land (red) and global mean temperature (black, blue).

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  • 25 March 2014

    In the Commentary ‘No pause in the increase of hot temperature extremes’ (Nature Climate Change 4, 161–163; 2014) references 12 and 18 were incorrect, and should have appeared as: 12. IPCC, 2012: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (eds Field, C. B. et al.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). 18. Seneviratne, S. I. et al. in IPCC 2012: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (eds Field C. B. et al.) 109–230 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012). These have now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions after print 25 March 2014.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly conducted during a sabbatical of S.I.S. at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (COECSS). S.I.S. and B.M. acknowledge partial funding from the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme, under grant agreement 282672, EMBRACE project. M.G.D. and L.V.A. acknowledge funding through the Australian Research Council grants CE110001028 and LP100200690.

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S.I.S. designed the study with substantial inputs from all authors. M.G.D., B.M. and S.I.S. analysed the data. S.I.S. and L.V.A. wrote the article, with inputs from M.G.D. and B.M.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sonia I. Seneviratne.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information

Calculation of extreme warm day exceedances (ExD10, ExD30, ExD50) for ERA-Interim and HadEX2 datasets (PDF 1870 kb)

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Seneviratne, S., Donat, M., Mueller, B. et al. No pause in the increase of hot temperature extremes. Nature Clim Change 4, 161–163 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2145

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