The Alaskan Summer 2019 Extreme Heat Event: The Role of Anthropogenic Forcing, and Projections of the Increasing Risk of Occurrence
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2021EF002163.pdf
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Author(s)
Weidman, Sarah K.
Delworth, Thomas L.
Kapnick, Sarah B.
Cooke, William F.
Date Issued
August 2021
Journal
Earth's Future
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Citation
Weidman, S. K., Delworth, T. L.,
Kapnick, S. B., & Cooke, W. F. (2021).
The Alaskan summer 2019 extreme
heat event: The role of anthropogenic
forcing, and projections of the
increasing risk of occurrence. Earth's
Future, 9, e2021EF002163
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Extreme heat occurred over Alaska in June–July 2019, posing risks to infrastructure,
ecosystem, and human health. It is vital to improve our understanding of the causes of such events
and the extent to which anthropogenic forcing may alter their likelihood and magnitude. Here, we use
multiple large ensembles of climate models, comprising thousands of simulated years, to investigate these
issues. Our results suggest that the presence of anthropogenic radiative forcing increased the likelihood of
the 2019 extreme heat event by as much as 6%. Further we show the rate of occurrence of such an extreme
heat event is likely to substantially increase in the future with increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse
gases. While uncertainty in projected climate risk from model choice leads to a broad range of future
extreme heat event probabilities, some models project that with rapidly increasing levels of greenhouse
gases the likelihood of such events would exceed 75% by 2090.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2021ef002163
