Time of emergence is a concept showing when the trend in a climate variable emerges above the “noise” of natural climate variability. A study led by Centre of Excellence PhD student Xu (Pete) Deng used large ensembles of the latest state-of-the-art climate models and a range of future scenarios to understand this concept for temperature extremes over Australia. The strongest warming levels, and therefore earlier time of emergence, are projected under the highest future scenario, with tropical Australia usually showing the highest warming. However, emergence patterns differ greatly for different extreme indices and there is large inter-model uncertainty in time of emergence, with internally generated variations influencing the noise.

Deng, X., Perkins-Kirkpatrick, S.E., Alexander, L.V., Stark, C., 2022. Projected changes and time of emergence of temperature extremes over Australia in CMIP5 and CMIP6. Earth’s Future 10, e2021EF002645. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EF002645