Global warming will bring more variable temperatures in summer and less variable in winter, finds new study.
Summers in Europe will feature more unusually cooler days as well as hotter ones in the future due to climate change, new research has revealed.
While more extreme temperatures, and higher average temperatures, have long been predicted by scientists, a team of researchers have now carried out the most sophisticated study yet to fill in the gaps about how global warming will actually influence summer and winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere.
They found that the likelihood of temperatures rising above or falling below the new average will not be affected in the same way for different seasons and regions, and this has implications for the strategies being designed to build resilience to the changing climate.
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, finds that, in addition to the predicted increase in average temperature, fluctuations in temperature around the average will become more erratic during summer in Europe.
In winter, temperature deviations relative to the new average will be less pronounced over most of the northern hemisphere, as unusually warm days become relatively less common, and unusually cold days even rarer.
Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Chair of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, at Imperial College London, was co-author of the study along with colleagues at the University of Reading.
