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Accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming

Nature Geoscience volume 18, pages 716–723 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Heatwaves are expected to both increase in frequency and duration under global warming. The probability distributions of heatwave durations are shaped by day-to-day correlations in temperature and so cannot be simply inferred from changes in the probabilities of daily temperature extremes. Here we show from statistical analysis of global historical and projected temperature data that changes in long-duration heatwaves increase nonlinearly with temperature. Specifically, from analysis informed by theory for autocorrelated fluctuations applied to European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) reanalysis and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) climate model simulations, we find that the nonlinearity results in acceleration of the rate increase with warming; that is, each increment of regional time-averaged warming increases the characteristic duration scale of long heatwaves more than the previous increment. We show that the curve for this acceleration can be approximately collapsed onto a single dependence across regions by normalizing by local temperature variability. Projections of future change can thus be compared to observations of recent change over part of their range, which supports the near-future-projected acceleration. We also find that the longest, most uncommon heatwaves for a given region have the greatest increase in likelihood, yielding a compounding source of nonlinear impacts.

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Fig. 1: Probability distributions of heatwave durations.
Fig. 2: Spatial patterns of heatwave duration scales in the current climate.
Fig. 3: Nonlinear increases in an extreme heatwave duration percentile as a function of normalized mean increases in temperature.
Fig. 4: Spatial changes in heatwave duration scale and squared normalized temperature variations.
Fig. 5: Projected heatwave duration risk ratios in different regions of the world.

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Data availability

All datasets are taken from publicly available repositories. CMIP6 data were downloaded from https://aims2.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/. ERA5 data were downloaded from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5. MERRA-2 data were downloaded from https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/merra-2/.

Code availability

Relevant code to calculate heatwave durations and their change in statistics is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15556686 (ref. 66).

Change history

  • 14 October 2025

    In the version of the Supplementary information initially published, in Eq. S2, a factor of ½ was omitted in front of the erf term. This was a typographical error, and no results or figures are affected. The corrected Supplementary information is now available alongside the online version of the article.

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Acknowledgements

C.M.-V. acknowledges support from Proyecto ANID Fondecyt Iniciación 11250471 and Data Observatory Foundation ANID Technology Center number DO210001. J.D.N. acknowledges support from US National Science Foundation AGS-2414576. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access and the multiple funding agencies that support CMIP6 and ESGF. We also acknowledge high-performance computing support from Cheyenne provided by National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering and Science, Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Martinez-Villalobos

  2. Data Observatory Foundation, ANID Technology Center, Santiago, Chile

    Cristian Martinez-Villalobos

  3. Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Danning Fu

  4. Department of Geography, Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

    Paul C. Loikith

  5. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    J. David Neelin

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  1. Cristian Martinez-Villalobos
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Contributions

C.M.-V. and J.D.N. conceived the study. D.F. and C.M.-V. conducted the analysis and wrote the first draft with help by P.C.L. and J.D.N. All authors reviewed the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cristian Martinez-Villalobos.

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Nature Geoscience thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editors: Stefan Lachowycz and Tom Richardson, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Supplementary Text 1, Figs. 1–13 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Martinez-Villalobos, C., Fu, D., Loikith, P.C. et al. Accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming. Nat. Geosci. 18, 716–723 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01737-w

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