Prolonged Siberian heat of 2020 almost impossible without human influence

Over the first half of 2020, Siberia experienced the warmest period from January to June since records began and on the 20th of June the weather station at Verkhoyansk reported 38 °C, the highest daily maximum temperature recorded north of the Arctic Circle. We present a multi-model, multi-method analysis on how anthropogenic climate change affected the probability of these events occurring using both observational datasets and a large collection of climate models, including state-of-the-art higher-resolution simulations designed for attribution and many from the latest generation of coupled ocean-atmosphere models, CMIP6. Conscious that the impacts of heatwaves can span large differences in spatial and temporal scales, we focus on two measures of the extreme Siberian heat of 2020: January to June mean temperatures over a large Siberian region and maximum daily temperatures in the vicinity of the town of Verkhoyansk. We show that human-induced climate change has dramatically increased the probability of occurrence and magnitude of extremes in both of these (with lower confidence for the probability for Verkhoyansk) and that without human influence the temperatures widely experienced in Siberia in the first half of 2020 would have been practically impossible.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10584-021-03052-w.