Extreme heat in New Zealand: a synthesis

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1312759/v1

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Extreme heat in New Zealand: a synthesis

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1312759/v1

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Extreme heatwaves are among the fastest-changing meteorological hazards in a warming world. While likely also true for New Zealand, significant knowledge gaps exist relating to the current and future risks associated with extreme heat. Using high-quality station observations dating back to at least 1972, this study presents the first detailed synthesis of the severity, frequency and persistence of extreme heat experienced by local communities in New Zealand. Results show the hottest days of the year have warmed by more than 0.5°C over the last twenty years for many populated regions, a rate which exceeds average annual changes across the country. When evaluating the risks associated with unusually extreme events, complex regional differences emerge. While the East Coast of both islands witness higher absolute temperatures during local heatwaves, lower levels of day-to-day temperature variability in the northern half of the North Island will translate to larger risks with further warming over the twenty-first century.

Whether focusing on communities living in hot, tropical climates or those in cooler, mid-latitude climates, there exists clear evidence of the manifold risks associated with extreme high temperatures, including for human health (Gasparrini et al. 2015; Vicedo-Cabrera et al. 2021), animal welfare (Bryant et al. 2007; Dunn et al. 2014) and economic productivity (Steffen et al. 2019). Similarly stark evidence shows both the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events are increasing worldwide, in response to anthropogenic climate change (Vogel et al. 2019; Harrington 2021a; Philip et al. 2021). Despite this globally ubiquitous evidence base, extreme heat remains chronically understudied in New Zealand. For example, the primary metric used to characterise extreme heat across the country - including for central and local government risk assessments (MfE 2018) – involves identifying exceedances of 25°C, despite a lack of evidence to justify that choice (Harrington 2021b).

Understanding how local high-temperature extremes will change with further global warming is also complicated by the limited ability of coarse-resolution climate models to capture the nuanced microclimates of New Zealand, a relatively small, mountainous country surrounded by ocean (Flato et al. 2013; Williams et al. 2016). However, the challenges of climate model fidelity overlook potentially powerful insights that can be drawn from more effectively interrogating simple observational datasets (Ranasinghe et al. 2021).

This analysis will use daily maximum and minimum temperature observations from thirty high-quality, long-duration weather stations to improve the basis for risk assessments associated with locally extreme heat in New Zealand. Specifically, this analysis will quantify how the frequency, intensity and persistence of extreme heat events vary for different regions across the country, while also examining how regional diversity in these characteristics of extreme heat can be better accounted for in future metrics of extreme heat risk.

1.1. Data selection

Quality-controlled daily maximum and minimum temperature data were extracted for thirty geographically diverse weather stations (see Figure 1) from the freely-available database (https://bit.ly/3DVyc76), made available by New Zealand’s Ministry for the Environment as part of their Our Climate and Atmosphere 2020 report (MfE 2020). Time-series of daily temperature maxima and minima were available for the period spanning 1972 to 2019 (inclusive) for all thirty stations: some stations also had additional data dating back to as early as 1928, albeit with increasingly high numbers of “missing data” days (see Supplementary Table 1).

To ensure a focus on the risks associated with the present-day climate, we restrict our analysis to the 40-year period spanning 1980-2019 when calculating local heatwave thresholds in Sections 2 and 3, but otherwise consider all available data when examining historical trends of high-temperature extremes in Section 4. Section 5 offers a pseudo-global warming analysis to highlight the importance of interannual variability when interpreting future heat risks, before a synthesis and summary is presented in Sections 6 and 7.

Past assessments of high temperatures in New Zealand have mostly focused on the climatological frequency of “hot days”, whereby any day was considered “hot” if temperatures exceeded 25°C, regardless of location. Of course, characterising extreme heat in such a binary framework obscures second-order differences between locations, while also failing to capture potentially significant differences between the adverse effects of a 26°C day versus a 36°C day.

Figure 2 explores these details further by presenting exceedance distributions of daily maximum temperature statistics for four selected locations (results for all thirty stations are presented in the supplementary information). The thick green line in each figure panel shows the average number of days per year exceeding temperature thresholds spanning 24°C to 31°C (using data from 1980-2019), while the green shaded regions span the range of values found on the fourth-hottest (90th percentile) and fourth-coolest year (10th percentile), when each year was assessed individually.

While all four locations experience a comparable number of days per year hotter than 25°C on average, clear differences can be seen in the shape of the temperature distribution and with respect to interannual variability around these mean results. For example, the eastern stations of Christchurch and Napier both tend to have a long distribution tail, with 29°C being exceeded some ten days per year on average. But they also exhibit lower levels of variability around these numbers, with differences in the number of extreme hot days between the coolest and hottest years varying by no more than twenty days. By contrast, both the northern stations of Auckland and Hamilton show fewer occurrences of extreme hot days but also higher levels of year-to-year variability. Indeed, the hottest 10% of years in Hamilton see a threshold of 26°C exceeded on at least 40 occasions while the hottest 10% of years in Christchurch exceed the same threshold only 36 or more times – this despite the fact that an average Christchurch summer sees 25 exceedances and Hamilton only 21.

As well as resolving regional differences in the statistical properties of extreme heat at daily timescales, Figure 2 (and Figures S1-S30) also offers insights relating to the temporal persistence of extreme hot spells for the four case study locations. Specifically, we calculated the proportion of all individual days above a temperature threshold which belonged to a hot spell in which that same threshold was exceeded for at least three (or five) consecutive days in total. The corresponding results are presented (for an average year only) as the brown and sky blue lines in Figure 2.

Comparing across locations, it becomes clear that the majority of extreme hot days seen in Christchurch occur as one- or two-day hot spells only, with a remarkably small fraction of days belonging to hot spells lasting three days or more. Such a result is consistent with our understanding of the meteorological drivers of extreme heat over the east coast of the South Island: strong north-westerly winds are needed to advect warm, moist air over the Southern Alps, before air temperatures rapidly warm from a combination of the föhn effect and sensible heat flux over the Canterbury Plains (Macara 2016). However, these weather systems are associated with inherently unstable flow regimes and therefore rarely persist over one region for a long period (Macara 2016). By contrast, most locations in the upper North Island (as exemplified by Hamilton and Auckland in Figure 2) experience more than half of their hot days in the form of protracted hot spells lasting at least five days.

To improve the management of heat-related health and economic risks, as well as to assist the preparation of climate change adaptation plans, localised definitions of heatwaves have become commonplace in communities around the world (Matthies et al. 2008; Perkins and Alexander 2013). Here, we re-examine the temperature data presented in Section 2 to develop a transparent method of defining local heatwave thresholds across New Zealand.

3.1. Selecting heatwave thresholds on the basis of relative rarity

First, temperature data are re-analysed to identify all discrete heat events for which different integer thresholds of daily maximum temperature were consecutively exceeded for a variety of N-day timescales, with N spanning from 1 to 10 days. Further details are provided in Table 1 for an example station (Christchurch), with results for all stations presented in the Supplementary Information.

Next, we applied two expert judgements: the first was choosing to primarily focus on relatively extreme 3-day hot spells (brown lines in Figure 2; pink shaded row in Table 1), broadly following the recommendations of Perkins (2015). Second, we chose to select an integer temperature threshold to define heatwave events at each station, such that approximately ten unique events (hereafter “heatwaves”) had occurred there over the last 40 years, each of which lasting three or more days. Because only integer temperature thresholds were considered, the subsequent heatwave count did end up varying for different locations, ranging between 7 and 17 events (see Tables S2-S31). For the Christchurch example presented in Table 1, there were 29 separate occasions where daily maximum temperatures exceeded 28°C for three or more consecutive days (too frequent), while only four of those events saw three consecutive days above 30°C (too rare). Thus, we opted to define a heatwave in Christchurch as any period of (at least) three consecutive days when maximum temperatures exceeds 29°C, a criteria met eleven times between 1980 and 2019.

		Daily maximum temperature threshold (°C)
		23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31
Number of consecutive days equal to or above threshold	1	1180	1049	868	706	569	440	320	230	144
	2	531	409	314	223	169	117	77	45	17
	3	244	173	112	77	50	29	11	3	1
	4	116	71	48	36	18	8	1	0	0
	5	63	39	23	15	4	2	0	0	0
	6	33	12	5	3	2	0	0	0	0
	7	16	5	2	0	0	0	0	0	0
	8	7	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	9	4	1	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
	10	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Table 1: Absolute frequency of extreme hot spells in Christchurch for the forty-year period spanning 1980-2019. The top row shows the number of individual days during which daily maximum temperatures equalled or exceeded each of the specified integer temperature thresholds. For example, if the daily maximum temperature on one day was recorded as 27.3 degrees, this would be recorded as an additional day in all columns up to and including the “27°C” threshold. The other rows of the table show the number of discrete occasions where exceedances of the specified temperature threshold occurred as part of a hot spell persisting for at least the specified number of days, with the third row (pink) used to select heatwave temperature thresholds (light blue). For example, the fifth row aligning with the 26°C column contains 15 counts: this means that there were 15 separate occasions throughout the 40-year record which were associated with hot spells equal to or longer than five days, and where daily maximum temperatures were equal to or above 26°C for each of these individual days. If an individual hot spell lasted seven rather than five days, that would be recorded as one additional count in each of the rows up to and including the seventh row, rather than up to and including the fifth row.

3.2. Variations in the intensity of local heatwaves

As seen in Figure 3a, applying this framework for all stations yields local heatwave thresholds ranging from 23°C to 30°C across the country. Most of the northern half of the North Island have thresholds of 27°C or 28°C, while values of 28°C or above are commonplace along the eastern coast of the country, including those Central Otago stations (23-25 in Figure 1) immediately leeward of the Southern Alps. Stations along the west and southwest of the North Island, and in the southeast of the South Island, typically exhibit heatwave thresholds of 25°C, while even cooler thresholds are found along the South Island’s west coast.

It is important to acknowledge that these thresholds have been determined solely on the basis of daytime maximum temperatures persisting for consecutive days. While the severity of daily maximum temperatures indeed represent the primary determinant of adverse health outcomes from extreme heat (Hajat et al. 2010; Mayrhuber et al. 2018; Ebi et al. 2021), minimum overnight temperatures also play an important role when contextualizing the overall risks associated with a heatwave. For example, if temperatures cool significantly overnight, this can help to offset the accumulation of risk otherwise associated with extended periods of extreme daily maximum temperatures (Scalley et al. 2015).

In this context, Figure 3b reveals the most common daily minimum temperatures recorded at each station, when averaging across all recorded heatwave days. While most locations in the North Island experience overnight temperatures averaging over 16°C during heatwave periods, there are distinctly cooler regions found in the South Island. Selected stations in Central Otago, particularly Lake Tekapo and Tara Hills, exhibit overnight temperatures averaging only 11°C during local heatwaves, suggesting that relative risks in these regions could be less pronounced, despite temperatures regularly exceeding 30°C during the day in heatwave conditions.

When further considering the full distribution of daily maximum and minimum temperatures in Figure 4, a clearer understanding of the diversity in temperature extremes seen during locally-defined heatwaves emerges. As is perhaps expected, given that all heatwave days have been defined with a prescribed lower bound for maximum temperatures, variations in heatwave severity during the hottest time of day are largely small: most stations have an interquartile range of less than 2°C when considering maximum temperatures from all heatwave days. By contrast, this range is nearer 3-5°C for corresponding overnight temperatures. Combined, the full statistics of Figure 4 show the limited potential to discriminate heat-related risks during heatwaves on the basis of exceptionally cool overnight temperatures: arguably, only those stations at higher elevations in the North Island (Waiouru) and the aforementioned Central Otago stations show significant departures from overnight temperatures also seen elsewhere.

Finally, to consider the potential of alternative proxies for extreme local heat, Figure 4 further includes grey bars to denote the 90th percentile of daily maximum temperatures across all February days (FQ90) – a metric which is clearly less rigorous than the heatwave thresholds introduced in Section 3.1, but nevertheless offers value by being simple to understand. Comparing the two metrics, we find that FQ90 happens to approximate the more complex heatwave thresholds in a few locations, like Auckland and Christchurch. More generally though, stations tend to exhibit an FQ90 value one or two degrees cooler than their corresponding heatwave threshold (the lower bound of the orange distributions).

In the context of worsening anthropogenic climate change, it is important to also understand how extreme summer temperatures have changed in New Zealand over recent decades. Examining these changes are particularly important given that New Zealand was one of the few regions for which the confidence of attributable increases in the frequency of hot extremes was judged to be low by Working Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their Sixth Assessment Report, owing to a lack of supporting evidence in the peer-reviewed literature (Seneviratne et al. 2021).

4.1. Recent changes in the intensity of summertime heat

Figure 5 shows time-series of daily temperature maxima (T_max) averaged over all January and February days for each station, with anomalies presented with respect to a 1981-2000 baseline. As an example, each purple marker in the middle figure panel shows the median T_max anomaly based on all January and February days for that year and the nine previous years, and for each of the 30 stations. The thick and thin blue lines respectively denote the average anomaly across all stations for each year (where data are available for all stations), along with the 16^th-84^th percentile range (approximating a one standard deviation range).

Results show a range of decadal fluctuations pre-1980, none of which are robust across all stations (not shown), followed by a statistically increase in the magnitude of summertime temperatures over the last twenty years. Specifically, the ten years spanning 2010-2019 is more than 0.5°C warmer than the baseline period for the median station, with consistent increases in ten-year running mean temperatures seen year-on-year since 2000-09. This trend of rising temperatures is robust across all stations and whether considering the 10^th, 50^th or 90^th percentile of summertime temperatures, thereby offering confidence that a signal of summertime warming has in fact emerged from internal variability (Hawkins et al. 2020), even when using a relatively recent baseline period of 1981-2000 (Hawkins and Sutton 2015). Furthermore, the lack of any discernible differences between Figures 5a and 5c suggests that these increasing temperature anomalies are mostly emerging through a uniform shift of the distribution mean, rather than through a combination of changes in both the mean and shape of the distribution.

4.2. Recent changes in the frequency of extreme summer heat

Figure 6 similarly considers historical changes in summertime heat across all stations, this time examining changes in the frequency of extreme heat by looking at exceedances of the 90^th, 95^th and 99^th percentile of T_max across all January and February days (again relative to a 1981-2000 baseline period). While recognising that a running “change in probability” metric necessarily centres on unity for the baseline period, these results nevertheless show negligible changes earlier in the twentieth century, before a signal of more frequent hot days begins to again emerge over the last twenty years. The variability between stations becomes more pronounced when considering increasingly higher percentile thresholds, which is an expected outcome of reducing the sample size from which to draw conclusions. Despite this, the time-evolution of changes in hot day probability for the median station remains robust across the three hot day definitions, increasing by at least 50% when comparing the most recent ten-year period with the late-twentieth century baseline.

Understanding how further increases in global temperatures will propagate to affect local extreme heat risks is another critical step for local and national decision-makers in New Zealand, particularly to ensure appropriate and proportional response measures can be developed.

To do so, Figures 7a and 7c respectively presents the distribution of all daily maximum temperatures observed in Christchurch and Auckland between 1980 and 2019 for the hottest months of January and February (≈2360 days). Using these distributions, five categories of “hot day” are considered for each location, with the lower bounds of each corresponding to the 80th, 90th, 95th, 99th and 99.9th percentiles: by definition, the fraction of days falling within each of these categories are also fixed at increasingly small values (see bars on farthest left of panels b and d). Third, we uniformly shift each of the temperature distributions by increments of +1°C, +2°C and +3°C as a simple proxy for twenty-first century changes in local temperatures, and then consider how the frequency of days falling within each of the fixed hot day categories evolve.

Several robust patterns emerge when considering these synthetic changes in summertime heat. For example, the first increment of warming always generates larger relative changes in the frequency of all categories of extreme heat when compared with subsequent increments of change: as seen in Figure 7d, Auckland experiences a 5.8-fold increase in the most extreme heat category after the first degree of warming but only a 2.9-fold increase in response to the third degree of warming.

Second, it is always the most extreme heat thresholds which exhibit the fastest increases in recurrence frequency with further warming. Across both stations, the number of days falling within the yellow hot day category increase from 10% to 14-15% after 3°C of uniform warming (an increase of 50%), while the number of days falling within the most extreme hot day category rise from 0.1% to between 1.4% (Christchurch) and 6.4% (Auckland) in response to the same signal of change (an increase of 1400% and 6400%, respectively). This pattern of the most extreme temperatures increasing in frequency fastest is consistent with previous research (Kharin et al. 2018), and can be partly explained by the fact that the upper bounds of change in recurrence frequency are driven by the baseline rarity of that event: a rarer event means larger relative increases in frequency can occur in the future (Harrington and Otto 2018).

However, the clearest result of Figure 7 is the contrasting speed with which extreme heat is changing in Auckland versus Christchurch. In Auckland, lower levels of temperature variability mean that 70% of all summer days will fall within one of the five hot day categories after a 3°C rise in average temperatures: by contrast, an equivalent level of warming only results in half as many days (36%) falling into one of the hot day categories in Christchurch, due to its inherently more variable summertime climate. Similar differences exist when looking at any of the individual hot day categories and are most pronounced for the most extreme categories. In short, locations which exhibit low levels of temperature variability – as is the case for much of the northern half of the North Island – will always experience the emergence of extreme heat-related risks much faster with additional warming (Frame et al. 2017; Harrington 2021a).

Lastly, to synthesize our improved understanding of extreme heat for each station in this analysis, Table 1 presents expert judgements of the combined, relative risks of extreme heat for vulnerable communities in each location, using a qualitative numerical scale (1 is very low risk, 5 is very high). To offer further clarity as to how we make a qualitative designation for each station (Harrington et al. 2021), additional columns are presented relating to the relative severity of daytime temperatures, overnight temperatures and the likelihood of extreme heat persisting across multi-day timescales (stations with lower day-to-day temperature variability, as with Section 5, also experience much longer heatwaves). It’s emphasised that this framework is used to disaggregate relative heat risks for different locations only within New Zealand: even stations in the highest risk categories of Table 1 will likely experience milder impacts relating to extreme heat than many lower latitude and lower income countries around the world (King and Harrington 2018).

As Table 1 shows, both Hawke’s Bay (Napier) and the East Cape (Gisborne) are classified as very high risk regions, driven by a combination of exceptionally hot heatwaves which often persist for more than three days, along with little respite being offered by high minimum temperatures overnight. Similarly, nearly all stations in the northern half of the North Island have been classified as high risk: these stations have local heatwaves which can last for exceptionally long periods, and with minimal cooling overnight, although the magnitude of daytime temperature maxima tends to be lower than Napier and Gisborne.

Included in the “moderate” risk category are many stations situated in the rain shadows of mountainous regions: they all share the characteristics of having extremely high temperatures during local heatwaves, but any health impacts are likely tempered by each heatwave day being interspersed by much cooler temperatures overnight (averaging 12°C or below). Christchurch and Timaru have also been classed as moderate risk locations, but this choice was made primarily because local heatwaves regularly failed to persist for more than two days as opposed to temperatures dropping markedly overnight.

All remaining stations are categorised as either low or very low risk. Many of these communities are either coastal, preferentially exposed to cooler weather systems arriving from the south of New Zealand, or situated next to lakes at higher elevations: all of these factors contribute to summertime temperatures remaining cooler than other parts of the country, even during relatively extreme events.

Table 1

Expert judgement of the relative risks associated with extreme heat for different regions in New Zealand.
Location	Risk category	Criteria
Location	Risk category	Daytime temperature	Overnight temperatures	Persistence across days
Napier, Gisborne	5 (Very High)	Very High	High	High
Kerikeri, Whangārei, Whangaparāoa, Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Whakatane, Taumarunui.	4 (High)	High	High	High
Lake Tekapo, Tara Hills, Queenstown, Masterton, Reefton, Blenheim.	3 (Moderate)	Very High	Low	Moderate-High
Christchurch, Timaru	3 (Moderate)	Very High	Moderate	Low
New Plymouth, Nelson, Whanganui, Taupō, Rotorua, Gore.	2 (Low)	Moderate	High	High
Hokitika, Milford Sound, Invercargill, Wellington, Waiouru, Dunedin.	1 (Very Low)	Low-Moderate	Low-Moderate	Low-Moderate

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the absence of any humidity considerations in this study. This is primarily the result of data constraints: high-quality station observations of hourly relative humidity (daily-mean data is insufficient to meaningfully quantify heat stress (Vanos et al. 2020)) are only available for 28 years at some stations, with many stations having even shorter records. Focusing on temperature-only heatwave metrics does offer a more useful benchmark for future climate change studies, since bias-correcting climate model representations of heat stress maxima is more complex when compared with adjusting for temperature maxima alone (Sippel et al. 2016). However, future research should be prioritised to examine the characteristics of recent heatwave events in New Zealand using both humidity-based heat stress metrics and temperature-only approaches.

Increases in the severity and frequency of extreme heatwaves are one of the clearest manifestations of a warming climate (Perkins-Kirkpatrick and Gibson 2017). While initial research has pointed to similar outcomes also emerging over New Zealand (Harrington 2021b), there remains a lack of published research as to how extreme heat events are already affecting individual communities in New Zealand. Of course, local decision makers and public health practitioners need an understanding of the basic characteristics of extreme heat events in the current climate before they can meaningfully prepare for the worsening effects of a warmer future. This analysis was intended to address these information deficits by offering a comprehensive assessment of the severity, persistence and frequency of locally extreme heatwaves for thirty locations throughout New Zealand (Sections 2 and 3). Further, we have quantified recently observed changes in extreme heat (Section 4), as well as offering insights as to how future changes in mean temperature can be understood in terms of influencing the recurrence frequency of extreme hot days (Section 5).

Our synthesis helps to reveal which regions in New Zealand are more (or less) susceptible to the adverse impacts of extreme heat, along with supporting evidence to explain our expert judgements. We have also quantified with unprecedented detail how the statistical characteristics of extreme heat can vary for different parts of the country, and how further changes might emerge in the future. Combined, this information will enable local councils, health providers and central government to work from a common evidence base, a crucial step in ensuring local communities can successfully adapt to the heatwaves of tomorrow.

Ethical Approval:

Not applicable

Consent to Participate & Publish:

LJH, & DF all declare their consent.

Authors Contributions:

LJH conceived the study and performed the data analysis. LJH and DF both contributed equally to the writing of the manuscript.

Funding:

LJH and DF acknowledge support from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment via the Endeavour Fund (Whakahura program).

Competing Interests:

The authors declare no competing interests

Availability of data and materials:

All data are publicly available via https://data.mfe.govt.nz/table/105056-daily-temperature-1909-2019/

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Reviewers agreed at journal
20 May, 2022
Reviews received at journal
20 Feb, 2022
Reviewers invited by journal
03 Feb, 2022
Editor assigned by journal
01 Feb, 2022
First submitted to journal
30 Jan, 2022

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Extreme heat in New Zealand: a synthesis

Status:

Version 1

Abstract

Figures

1. Introduction

1.1. Data selection

2. Baseline Exposure To Extreme Heat Over Multi-day Timescales

3. Defining Local Heatwaves Using Historical Data

3.1. Selecting heatwave thresholds on the basis of relative rarity

3.2. Variations in the intensity of local heatwaves

4. Historical Changes In Mean And Extreme Temperatures Across New Zealand

5. Understanding The Emergence Of Future Changes In Extreme Heat

6. Discussion

7. Summary

Declarations

References

Supplementary Files

Status:

Version 1