Temperature Extremes are Warming Faster than Earth's Average

Earth's temperatures anomalies may be warming faster than average. Scientists have found that while Earth's average temperature has been rising, spikes are rising even faster.

Trends in extreme heat and cold are important when it comes to monitoring the climate. These spikes can drastically influence water supplies, agricultural productivity and other factors related to human well-being. That's why the scientists decided to take a closer look at temperature anomalies to see their overall trend.

The researchers analyzed temperature records for the years 1881 to 2013 from HadCRUT4, a widely used data set for land and sea locations. Using monthly average temperatures at points across the globe, the scientists sorted them into "spatial percentiles," which represented how unusually they were by their geographic size.

"Average temperatures don't tell us everything we need to know about climate change," said Scott Robeson, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Arguably, these cold extremes and warm extremes are the most important factors for human society."

The researchers found that these climate extremes in the fifth and 95^th percentiles increased more than the overall average Earth temperature. In addition, the cold anomalies increased more than the warm anomalies over the 130-year record, which resulted in an overall narrowing of the range of Earth's temperatures. But in the past 30 years, this pattern has reversed with warm anomalies increasing at a faster pace than cold anomalies.

The findings reveal a bit more about what is happening to Earth's climate. More specifically, it shows that colder winter weather is occurring in some locales which, in turn, is amplifying warming elsewhere.

The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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