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Browsing PCIC Publications by Subject "attribution"
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Item A new statistical approach to climate change detection and attribution(Climate Dynamics, 2017) Ribes, Aurélien; Zwiers, Francis W.; Azaïs, Jean-Marc; Naveau, PhilippeWe propose here a new statistical approach to climate change detection and attribution that is based on additive decomposition and simple hypothesis testing. Most current statistical methods for detection and attribution rely on linear regression models where the observations are regressed onto expected response patterns to different external forcings. These methods do not use physical information provided by climate models regarding the expected response magnitudes to constrain the estimated responses to the forcings. Climate modelling uncertainty is difficult to take into account with regression based methods and is almost never treated explicitly. As an alternative to this approach, our statistical model is only based on the additivity assumption; the proposed method does not regress observations onto expected response patterns. We introduce estimation and testing procedures based on likelihood maximization, and show that climate modelling uncertainty can easily be accounted for. Some discussion is provided on how to practically estimate the climate modelling uncertainty based on an ensemble of opportunity. Our approach is based on the “models are statistically indistinguishable from the truth” paradigm, where the difference between any given model and the truth has the same distribution as the difference between any pair of models, but other choices might also be considered. The properties of this approach are illustrated and discussed based on synthetic data. Lastly, the method is applied to the linear trend in global mean temperature over the period 1951–2010. Consistent with the last IPCC assessment report, we find that most of the observed warming over this period (+0.65 K) is attributable to anthropogenic forcings (+0.67 ± 0.12 K, 90 % confidence range), with a very limited contribution from natural forcings (−0.01 ± 0.02 K).Item Lengthening of the growing season in wheat and maize producing regions(Weather and Climate Extremes, 2015) Mueller, Brigitte; Hauser, Mathias; Iles, Carley; Rimi, Ruksana Haque; Zwiers, Francis W.; Wan, HuiHuman-induced increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have led to rising global temperatures. Here we investigate changes in an annual temperature-based index, the growing season length, defined as the number of days with temperature above 5 °C. We show that over extratropical regions where wheat and maize are harvested, the increase in growing season length from 1956 to 2005 can be attributed to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Our analyses also show that climate change has increased the probability of extremely long growing seasons by a factor of 25, and decreased the probability of extremely short growing seasons. A lengthening of the growing season in regions with these mostly rain-fed crops could improve yields, provided that water availability does not become an issue. An expansion of areas with more than 150 days of growing season into the northern latitudes makes more land potentially available for planting wheat and maize. Furthermore, double-cropping can become an alternative to current practices in areas with very long growing seasons which are also shown to increase with a warming climate. These results suggest that there is a strong impact of anthropogenic climate change on growing season length. However, in some regions and with further exacerbated climate change, high temperatures may already be or may become a limiting factor for plant productivity.