Regional Impacts of Global Warming on Extreme Heat Stress Based on Regional Climate Projections

Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, a significant body of research has prompted a quantification of the impacts of different levels of warming specified by certain thresholds of global average temperature (e.g., 1.5°C, 2°C, 3°C). Most of these studies were conducted with global climate projections that show rather limited accuracy for describing regional details. This study attempts to identify how global warming can be disaggregated into the regional impacts in terms of extreme heat stress. An unprecedented level of regional climate projections generated within the CORDEX-CORE framework are analyzed over the nine selected CORDEX domains including North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, East, South and South-East Asia and Australia. Various heat stress indices that represent the combined effects of temperature and humidity are used to measure the human thermal comfort. The comparison of results between RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 scenarios will provide a valuable insight for possible benefits of global warming mitigation at regional scales. This study is timely required to understand regionally emerging challenges faced by globally targeted warming, which is imperative to develop better adaptation strategies.

[Acknowledgements]

This research is supported by project 26309618 of the Early Career Scheme (ECS) of the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong.