The Editorial Committee of Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere (SOLA) gives The SOLA Award to outstanding paper(s) published each year. I am pleased to announce that The SOLA Award in 2019 is going to be presented to the paper by Dr. Yukiko Imada et al., entitled with “The July 2018 high temperature event in Japan could not have happened without human-induced global warming”.
Attribution of individual extreme weather and climate events on human-induced climate change, called event attribution (EA), is often obscured by strong atmospheric fluctuations. By exploiting the large ensembles of d4PDF global and regional atmospheric model simulations, this study performs EA of the extreme heat event in Japan in July 2018. The authors first show, based on a comparison of two global ensembles, that the event would have had virtually no chance to occur without human-induced global warming. Second, with the regional ensemble dataset, they propose a new method to estimate changes in the occurrence of extreme heat events in Japan in accordance with global warming. These analyses answer public concerns on how global warming affected the devastating heat event and how it will under future greenhouse gas warming. The authors further proceed to examine atmospheric circulation features that induced the heat wave. With the model simulations and a reanalysis dataset, they conclude that the enhancement of the lower-tropospheric subtropical anticyclone in the North Pacific and the anomalous eastward expansion of the upper-level Tibetan high are part of naturally-driven teleconnection patterns and human influence on the circulation anomalies is undetectable.
The Editorial Committee of SOLA highly evaluates this process-based EA as well as the social impacts of the paper.
References
- Imada, Y., M. Watanabe, H. Kawase, H. Shiogama, and M. Arai, 2019: The July 2018 high temperature event in Japan could not have happened without human-induced global warming. SOLA, 15A, 8−12, doi: 10.2151/sola.15A-002.