Future projections of Australian heat wave number and intensity based on CMIP5 models

Future projections of Australian heat wave number and intensity based on CMIP5 models

Australia is a continent of climatic extremes, experiencing devastating floods, decadal-long droughts and crippling heat waves. Since the late twentieth century, summer heat waves across Australia have been getting progressively longer, hotter and more frequent, with human-induced climate change a major player in the increase. This study utilises global climate models to project how the total number of summer heat waves will change and how hot, on average, they may become (their magnitude) by the end of the twenty-first century. While the models perform well at capturing the heat wave magnitude across Australia, they struggle to simulate the regional variations in the total number of events. The models project a doubling of heat wave events by 2100 across southern Australia, and an almost tripling in the northern-central regions, under a high greenhouse-gas emissions scenario. In the regions where the heat waves are hottest, such as Victoria, South Australia, and south-west Western Australia, the models project an increase of almost 2°C in magnitude by the end of the century. Furthermore, the intensity of these southern Australian heat waves is projected to rise faster than the long-term increase in the background temperature, implying the magnitude of these events may become more extreme in the future.

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