Icebergs crumbling into the sea may be what first come to mind when imagining the most dramatic effects of global warming.
But new University of Arizona-led research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that more record-breaking temperatures will actually occur in the tropics, where there is a large and rapidly growing population.
"People recognize that polar warming is much faster than the mid-latitudes and tropics; that's a fact," said lead study author Xubin Zeng, director of the UArizona Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center and a professor of atmospheric sciences. "The second fact is that the warming over land is greater than over ocean. The question now is: Where do we see more extreme heat events? Over polar regions or the tropics? Over land or ocean? That's the question we answer."
Zeng and his collaborators analyzed temperature data from the last 60 years in two different ways: by looking at raw temperature trends and normalized temperature trends. Raw temperature is the actual temperature measured outside, whereas normalized temperature is raw temperature divided by the year-to-year variations.
Read more at University of Arizona
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