摘要：Abstract. With the ongoing warming of the globe, it is important to quantify changes in the recentbehaviour of extreme events given their impacts on humanhealth, infrastructure and the natural environment. We use thesub-daily, multivariate, station-based HadISD dataset to study thechanges in the statistical distributions of temperature, dew point temperature andwind speeds. Firstly, we use zonally averaged quantities to show that thelowest temperatures during both day and night are changing morerapidly than the highest, with the effect more pronounced in thenorthern high latitudes. Along with increases in thezonally averaged mean temperature, thestandard deviation has decreased and the skew increased (increasingpositive tail, decreasing negative tail) over the last45 years, again with a stronger, more robust signal at higherlatitudes. Changes in the distribution of dew point temperature aresimilar to those of temperature. However, changes in the distributionof wind speeds indicate a more rapid change at higher speeds than at lower. Secondly, to assess in moredetail the spatial distribution of changes as well as changes across seasons and hours ofthe day we study each station individually. For stations which showclear indications of change in the statistical moments, the higher thestatistical moment, generally the more spatiallyheterogenous the patterns of change. The standard deviations oftemperatures are increasing in a band stretching from Europe throughChina but are decreasing across North America and in the highnorthern latitudes, indicating broadening and narrowing of thedistributions, respectively. Large seasonal differences arefound in the change of standard deviations of temperatures over NorthAmerica and eastern China. Temperatures in easternAsia also have increasing skew in the winter in contrast to theremainder of the year. The dew point temperatures show smallervariation in all of the moments but similar patterns to thetemperatures. For wind speeds, apart from the USA, standarddeviations are decreasing across the world, indicating a decrease invariability. Finally, we use quantileregression to show changes in the percentiles ofdistributions over time. These show an increasein high quantiles of temperature in eastern Europe during the summer and also in northernEurope for low quantiles in the winter, also indicating broadening and narrowing of thedistributions, respectively. In North America, the largest changes are atthe lower quantiles in northern latitudes for autumn and winter.Quantiles of dew point temperature are changing most in the autumn andwinter, especially in the northern parts of Europe.
