Terrestrial amplification of past, present, and future climate change.

Terrestrial amplification (TA) of land warming relative to oceans is apparent in recent climatic observations. TA results from land-sea coupling of moisture and heat and is therefore important for predicting future warming and water availability. However, the theoretical basis for TA has never been tested outside the short instrumental period, and the spatial pattern and amplitude of TA remain uncertain.

Intensification of subhourly heavy rainfall.

Short-duration rainfall extremes can cause flash flooding with associated impacts. Previous studies of climate impacts on extreme precipitation have focused mainly on daily rain totals. Subdaily extremes are often generated in small areas that can be missed by gauge networks or satellites and are not resolved by climate models.

Correction to: Changes in relative fit of human heat stress indices to cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal hospitalizations across five Australian urban populations.

The authors of the article would like to bring the following correction/corrigendum to attention: When recently investigating future changes in heat stress indices, we discovered an error in the use of the heatwave indices we compared in Goldie et al. (2017).

Changes in relative fit of human heat stress indices to cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal hospitalizations across five Australian urban populations.

Various human heat stress indices have been developed to relate atmospheric measures of extreme heat to human health impacts, but the usefulness of different indices across various health impacts and in different populations is poorly understood. This paper determines which heat stress indices best fit hospital admissions for sets of cardiovascular, respiratory, and renal diseases across five Australian cities. We hypothesized that the best indices would be largely dependent on location.

Prospects for narrowing bounds on Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity.

The concept of Earth's Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) is reviewed. A particular problem in quantifying plausible bounds for ECS has been how to account for all of the diverse lines of relevant scientific evidence. It is argued that developing and refuting physical storylines (hypotheses) for values outside any proposed range has the potential to better constrain these bounds and to help articulate the science needed to narrow the range further.

Temperature and Humidity Effects on Hospital Morbidity in Darwin, Australia.

Background: Many studies have explored the relationship between temperature and health in the context of a changing climate, but few have considered the effects of humidity, particularly in tropical locations, on human health and well-being. To investigate this potential relationship, this study assessed the main and interacting effects of daily temperature and humidity on hospital admission rates for selected heat-relevant diagnoses in Darwin, Australia.

Methods: Univariate and bivariate Poisson generalized linear models were used to find statistically significant predictors and the admission rates within bins of predictors were compared to explore nonlinear effects.

Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity refers to the ultimate change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing. Despite decades of research attempting to narrow uncertainties, equilibrium climate sensitivity estimates from climate models still span roughly 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, precluding accurate projections of future climate.

Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone.

Observational analyses have shown the width of the tropical belt increasing in recent decades as the world has warmed. This expansion is important because it is associated with shifts in large-scale atmospheric circulation and major climate zones. Although recent studies have attributed tropical expansion in the Southern Hemisphere to ozone depletion, the drivers of Northern Hemisphere expansion are not well known and the expansion has not so far been reproduced by climate models.

An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress.

Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature T(W), is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today.

Radiosonde daytime biases and late-20th century warming.

The temperature difference between adjacent 0000 and 1200 UTC weather balloon (radiosonde) reports shows a pervasive tendency toward cooler daytime compared to nighttime observations since the 1970s, especially at tropical stations. Several characteristics of this trend indicate that it is an artifact of systematic reductions over time in the uncorrected error due to daytime solar heating of the instrument and should be absent from accurate climate records. Although other problems may exist, this effect alone is of sufficient magnitude to reconcile radiosonde tropospheric temperature trends and surface trends during the late 20th century.