2018–2022 expected to be abnormally hot years

New research from the University of Southampton and the Laboratoire d’Océanographie Physique et Spatiale suggests that the average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans will be abnormally warm, beyond the Long-Term Global Warming Trend, over the next five years.

A new method for predicting mean temperatures, suggests that the next few years will likely be abnormally high in 2018-2022 – higher than figures inferred from anthropogenic global warming alone. In particular, this is due to a low probability of intense cold events.

The phenomenon is even more salient with respect to sea surface temperatures, due to a high probability of heat events, which, in the presence of certain conditions, can cause an increase in tropical storm activity.

Once the algorithm is ‘learned’ (a process which takes a few minutes), predictions are obtained in a few hundredths of a second on a laptop. In comparison, supercomputers require a week using traditional simulation methods.

For the moment, the method only yields an overall average, but scientists now would like to adapt it to make regional predictions and, in addition to temperatures, estimate precipitation and drought trends

Ref:
Sévellec, F. and S. S. Drijfhout, 2018: A Novel Probabilistic Forecast System Predicting Anomalously Warm 2018-2022 Reinforcing the Long-Term Global Warming Trend, Nature Communications, 9, 3024.