Berkeley Earth is honored to be presenting new research at the American Geophysical Union’s AGU2024 Conference, taking place from December 9th-13th in Washington DC. This year’s conference will mark the first public presentation of Berkeley Earth’s groundbreaking new work making climate model data more accurate and accessible. This new data set comprised of de-biased and downscaled local temperature projections, expected early next year, will mark the first forward-looking data set produced by the organization.
Additonally, Chief Scientist Dr. Robert Rohde will be discussing potential drivers behind 2023’s record-smashing heat in a session co-chaired by Berkeley Earth’s Dr. Zeke Hausfather.
You can find Berkeley Earth at the following AGU24 sessions:
Monday, December 9th, 2024
1:40-5:30pm
Convention Center Poster Hall B-C
We present a bias-corrected and downscaled global surface temperature product synthesized from 45 GCMs and 364 runs across five shared socioeconomic pathways. Bias correction is achieved by comparing reanalysis from ERA5 (1940-present) and observations from Berkeley Earth’s new high-resolution dataset (1850-present) against historical model runs. Each grid cell is decomposed into three components: (1) long-term climatology and trends, (2) seasonality, and (3) short-term weather variability. The climatology and seasonality are expressed using an effective 30-year moving windows and locally rescaled based on historical observations. Residual daily variability is modeled using an evolving empirically-estimated probability distribution that explicitly models the low probability tails using generalized Pareto formalism. This allows the probability of extreme events to be immediately estimated. Probability distributions for weather events are also adjusted to match historical patterns.
Tuesday, December 10th, 2024
2:21 – 2:33pm
Salon A (Convention Center)
This talk will provide an overview of the spatial and temporal evolution of temperatures in 2023 with an eye towards some its unusual features and possible causes. In 2023, monthly record warmth first appeared in June and persisted through the end of the year, with global averages often breaking monthly records by very large margins. The change was initially led by ocean warming, but land and ocean averages both set annual records, with 14% of the oceans and 23% of the land locally record warm in their 2023 annual average. While the transition to El Niño was expected to cause large-scale warming, global average temperatures rose sooner than expected from a typical El Niño transition and global ocean temperatures unexpectedly peaked months before El Niño peaked. In addition, widespread warmth in the North Atlantic developed in the first half of 2023 and persisted into 2024. At its peak, North Atlantic temperature anomalies reached levels expected to occur no more than once-in-a-century. At the same time, record warmth affected much of South and Central America.
