The DOI matches its Crossref record; 17 of the 17 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Time of emergence of climate signals
Open accessAbstract
The time at which the signal of climate change emerges from the noise of natural climate variability (Time of Emergence, ToE) is a key variable for climate predictions and risk assessments. Here we present a methodology for estimating ToE for individual climate models, and use it to make maps of ToE for surface air temperature (SAT) based on the CMIP3 global climate models. Consistent with previous studies we show that the median ToE occurs several decades sooner in low latitudes, particularly in boreal summer, than in mid‐latitudes. We also show that the median ToE in the Arctic occurs sooner in boreal winter than in boreal summer. A key new aspect of our study is that we quantify the uncertainty in ToE that arises not only from inter‐model differences in the magnitude of the climate change signal, but also from large differences in the simulation of natural climate variability. The uncertainty in ToE is at least 30 years in the regions examined, and as much as 60 years in some regions. Alternative emissions scenarios lead to changes in both the median ToE (by a decade or more) and its uncertainty. The SRES B1 scenario is associated with a very large uncertainty in ToE in some regions. Our findings have important implications for climate modelling and climate policy which we discuss.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Climate change 2007: the physical science basis
Solomon, S., Qin, D., Manning, M., Marquis, M. C., Averyt, K. B., Tignor, M., Miller, H. L., & Chen, Z. (2007) · Cited by 23,383
Uppala, S. M., KÅllberg, P. W., Simmons, A. J., Andrae, U., Bechtold, V. D. C., Fiorino, M., Gibson, J. K., Haseler, J., Hernandez, A., Kelly, G. A., et al. (2005) · Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society · doi:10.1256/qj.04.176 · Cited by 6,804
Meehl, G. A., Stocker, T. F., Collins, W. D., Friedlingstein, P., Gaye, A. T., Gregory, J. M., Kitoh, A., Knutti, R., Murphy, J. M., Noda, A., et al. (n.d.) · Bern Open Repository and Information System (University of Bern) · doi:10.48350/25539 · Cited by 3,726
Christensen, J. H., Hewitson, B. C., Busuioc, A., Chen, A., Gao, X., Held, R., Jones, R., Kolli, R. K., Kwon, W., Laprise, R., et al. (2007) · Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar-und Meeresforschung (Alfred-Wegener-Institut) · Cited by 3,177
The potential to narrow uncertainty in regional climate predictions.
Hawkins, E., & Sutton, R. (2009) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/2009bams2607.1 · Cited by 2,732
Self-citationUncertainty estimates in regional and global observed temperature changes: A new data set from 1850
Brohan, P., Kennedy, J. J., Harris, I., Tett, S. F. B., & Jones, P. D. (2006) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · doi:10.1029/2005jd006548 · Cited by 2,040
Climate models and their evaluation
Randall, D. A., & Fichefet, T. (2007) · University of Southern Queensland ePrints (University of Southern Queensland) · Cited by 1,500
Challenges in combining projections from multiple climate models.
Knutti, R., Furrer, R., Tebaldi, C., Cermak, J., & Meehl, G. A. (2010) · Journal of Climate · doi:10.1175/2009jcli3361.1 · Cited by 1,270
The potential to narrow uncertainty in projections of regional precipitation change
Hawkins, E., & Sutton, R. (2011) · Climate Dynamics · doi:10.1007/s00382-010-0810-6 · Cited by 1,052
Self-citationUnderstanding and Attributing Climate Change
Hegerl, G. C., Zwiers, F. W., Braconnot, P., Gillett, N. P., Luo, Y., Orsini, J. A. M., Nicholls, N., Penner, J. E., Stott, P. A., Allen, M. R., et al. (2007) · Cited by 685
Cited by
Changing El Niño–Southern Oscillation in a warming climate
Cai, W., Santoso, A., Collins, M., Dewitte, B., Karamperidou, C., Kug, J.-S., Lengaigne, M., McPhaden, M. J., Stuecker, M. F., Taschetto, A. S., et al. (2021) · Nature Reviews Earth & Environment · doi:10.1038/s43017-021-00199-z · Cited by 702
Climate, ecosystems, and planetary futures: The challenge to predict life in Earth system models
Bonan, G. B., & Doney, S. C. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aam8328 · Cited by 698
Global Emergence of Anthropogenic Climate Change in Fire Weather Indices
Abatzoglou, J. T., Williams, A. P., & Barbero, R. (2019) · Geophysical Research Letters · doi:10.1029/2018gl080959 · Cited by 680
Assessing recent trends in high-latitude Southern Hemisphere surface climate
Jones, J. M., Gille, S. T., Goosse, H., Abram, N. J., Canziani, P. O., Charman, D. J., Clem, K. R., Crosta, X., de Lavergne, C., Eisenman, I., et al. (2016) · Nature Climate Change · doi:10.1038/nclimate3103 · Cited by 359
Kjellström, E., Nikulin, G., Strandberg, G., Christensen, O. B., Jacob, D., Keuler, K., Lenderink, G., van Meijgaard, E., Schär, C., Somot, S., et al. (2018) · Earth System Dynamics · doi:10.5194/esd-9-459-2018 · Cited by 202
Metadata
- Authors
- Hawkins, E., & Sutton, R.
- Venue
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Publisher
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Published
- 2012-01
- Volume
- 39
- Issue
- 1
- ISSN
- 0094-8276 (ISSN-L)
- 1944-8007
- OpenAlex
- W2122156969
- Cited by
- 632
- References
- 17
- FWCI
- 11.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Time of emergence of climate signals. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1029/2011gl050087
- The paper
- Hawkins, E., & Sutton, R. (2012). Time of emergence of climate signals. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1029/2011gl050087
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
