Global daily weather patterns are linked to climate change, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study entitled “Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale” shatters the long-held notion that disassociates daily weather from climate change.
Researchers affirm that patterns of global temperature and humidity involve human factors and are distinct from natural variability. Based on their study, a day’s weather information worldwide can predict the long-term rise in global average temperature.
However, the study shows that measurements identifying humankind’s role in causing incidents like heat waves and floods could underestimate their contribution in triggering such extreme weather events.
“This ... is telling us that anthropogenic climate change has become so large that it exceeds even daily weather variability at the global scale,” study author Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said in a Washington Post interview. “This is disturbing as the Earth is on track for significantly more warming in even the most optimistic future scenarios.”
The study utilized tapped machine learning to gauge the correlation between patterns of temperature and moisture at daily, monthly and yearly time scales. Researchers also studied the metrics of global average surface temperatures as well as the energy imbalance of the planet. The results were used as basis of analyzing the human impact on climate change.
“We’ve always said when you look at weather, that’s not the same as climate,” the study’s co-author Reto Knutti told The Washington Post in an interview. “That’s still true locally; if you are in one particular place and you only know the weather right now, right here, there isn’t much you can say.”
“Global mean temperature on a single day is already quite a bit shifted. You can see this human fingerprint in any single moment,” he said. “Weather is climate change if you look over the whole globe.”
