Projecting the Most Likely Annual Urban Heat Extremes in the Central United States
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The Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences offers majors in three areas: Geology (traditional, environmental, or hydrogeology, for work as a surveyor or in mineral exploration), Meteorology (studies in global atmosphere, weather technology, and modeling for work as a meteorologist), and Earth Sciences (interdisciplinary mixture of geology, meteorology, and other natural sciences, with option of teacher-licensure).
History
The Department of Geology and Mining was founded in 1898. In 1902 its name changed to the Department of Geology. In 1965 its name changed to the Department of Earth Science. In 1977 its name changed to the Department of Earth Sciences. In 1989 its name changed to the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences.
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1898-present
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- Department of Geology and Mining (1898-1902)
- Department of Geology (1902-1965)
- Department of Earth Science (1965-1977)
- Department of Earth Sciences (1977-1989)
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- College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (parent college)
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Abstract
Climate studies based on global climate models (GCMs) project a steady increase in annual average temperature and severe heat extremes in central North America during the mid-century and beyond. However, the agreement of observed trends with climate model trends varies substantially across the region. The present study focuses on two different locations: Des Moines, IA and Austin, TX. In Des Moines, annual extreme temperatures have not increased over the past three decades unlike the trend of regionally-downscaled GCM data for the Midwest, likely due to a “warming hole” over the area linked to agricultural factors. This warming hole effect is not evident for Austin over the same time period, where extreme temperatures have been higher than projected by regionally-downscaled climate (RDC) forecasts. In consideration of the deviation of such RDC extreme temperature forecasts from observations, this study statistically analyzes RDC data in conjunction with observational data to define for these two cities a 95% prediction interval of heat extreme values by 2040. The statistical model is constructed using a linear combination of RDC ensemble-member annual extreme temperature forecasts with regression coefficients for individual forecasts estimated by optimizing model results against observations over a 52-year training period.
Comments
This article is published as Jahn, David E., William A. Gallus, Phong TT Nguyen, Qiyun Pan, Kristen Cetin, Eunshin Byon, Lance Manuel, Yuyu Zhou, and Elham Jahani. "Projecting the Most Likely Annual Urban Heat Extremes in the Central United States." Atmosphere 10, no. 12 (2019): 727. DOI: 10.3390/atmos10120727. Posted with permission.