2015 was hot. Globally, it was the warmest year on record by a large margin. But, there was an El Nino event in the Pacific which probably boosted temperatures slightly (by up to 0.1°C).
So, what can we expect for 2016? Using an analogy of similar El Nino events we can make some suggestions. Continue reading Expectations for 2016 global temperatures
Surface temperature rise is often thought of as synonymous with climate change. However a recently published paper in Nature Climate Change argues that Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) is what ultimately sets the pace of climate change and that substantive progress can be made by monitoring this key climate variable.
Guest post by Matt Palmer and Doug McNeall (UK Met Office) Continue reading Earth's energy imbalance
Much evidence has accumulated that temperature extremes and variability are changing. Accurately diagnosing such changes is of vital societal interest, not least because human induced climate change is often expected to materialise primarily through changes in the extreme tails.
Quantifying these features of climate time series statistically in climate models and observations is not straightforward. To a large extent, that is because extreme events are rare by definition, a fact that seems hardly surprising. This fact implies, however, that conventional methods quickly break down when it comes to the tails. This blog post serves s a cautionary note, in which we discuss how apparently very simple methods can result in severely biased estimates, and how this can be avoided1,2.
Guest post by Sebastian Sippel, MPIB, based on Sippel et al. (2015) Continue reading How to quantify changes in climate extremes without inducing artefacts?