edu.ucar.opensky::articles:25707 UCAR/NCAR - Library OpenSky Support PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000 opensky@ucar.edu http://opensky.ucar.edu/ homepage pointOfContact 2025-12-24T20:03:11.939619 ISO 19115-2 Geographic Information - Metadata - Part 2: Extensions for Imagery and Gridded Data ISO 19115-2:2009(E) https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7ns0zqz How unexpected was the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave? 2022-09-28T00:00:00Z publication https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7ns0zqz https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100380 McKinnon, K. A. author Simpson, Isla R. author UCAR/NCAR - Library publisher The 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave featured record-smashing high temperatures, raising questions about whether extremes are changing faster than the mean, and challenging our ability to estimate the probability of the event. Here, we identify and draw on the strong relationship between the climatological higher-order statistics of temperature (skewness and kurtosis) and the magnitude of extreme events to quantify the likelihood of comparable events using a large climate model ensemble (Community Earth System Model version 2 Large Ensemble [CESM2-LE]). In general, CESM2 can simulate temperature anomalies as extreme as those observed in 2021, but they are rare: temperature anomalies that exceed 4.5 sigma occur with an approximate frequency of one in a hundred thousand years. The historical data does not indicate that the upper tail of temperature is warming faster than the mean; however, future projections for locations with similar climatological moments to the Pacific Northwest do show significant positive trends in the probability of the most extreme events. UCAR/NCAR - Library OpenSky Support PO Box 3000 Boulder CO 80307-3000 opensky@ucar.edu http://opensky.ucar.edu/ homepage pointOfContact PDF Text theme Resource Type 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z publication Copyright 2022 American Geophysical Union. None eng geoscientificInformation