On the Role of Global Warming on the Statistics of Record-Breaking Temperatures

Abstract

We theoretically study long-term trends in the statistics of record-breaking daily temperatures and validate these predictions using Monte Carlo simulations and data from the city of Philadelphia, for which 126 years of daily temperature data is available. Using extreme statistics, we derive the number and the magnitude of record temperature events, based on the observed Gaussian daily temperatures distribution in Philadelphia, as a function of the number of elapsed years from the start of the data. We further consider the case of global warming, where the mean temperature systematically increases with time. We argue that the current warming rate is insufficient to measurably influence the frequency of record temperature events over the time range of the observations, a conclusion that is supported by numerical simulations and the Philadelphia temperature data.

11 pages, 6 figures, 2-column revtex4 format. For submission to Journal of Climate. Revised version has some new results and some errors corrected. Reformatted for Journal of Climate. Second revision has an added reference. In the third revision one sentence that explains the simulations is reworded for clarity. New revision 10/3/06 has considerable additions and new results. Revision on 11/8/06 contains a number of minor corrections and is the version that will appear in Phys. Rev. E