Quantifying Global Climate Change Impacts on Daily Record‐Breaking Temperature Events in China Over the Past Six Decades

ABSTRACT Climate change has significantly amplified the occurrence of extreme weather events globally, yet characterising and attributing record‐breaking temperature extremes – an especially severe category within such phenomena – is difficult. This study analyses the statistical feature of record‐breaking temperature extremes based on daily surface air temperature data from 2299 meteorological stations across China spanning from 1960 to 2023. The results indicate that summer record‐breaking high‐temperature events occur more frequently than theoretically predicted, whilst winter record‐breaking low‐temperature events exhibit the opposite pattern. Notably, post‐2020 summers demonstrate a more pronounced acceleration in high‐temperature record‐breaking frequency compared to preceding periods. Additionally, a detrended variance‐adjusted model is used to quantify how global climatic non‐stationarity modulates the evolution of local daily record‐breaking temperature extremes. The results show that climate‐driven trends account for 10%–30% of daily record‐breaking temperature events, with variance changes contributing merely 2%. These findings quantitatively elucidate the contribution of global climate change to the observed intensification in summer record‐breaking high‐temperature events and concomitant attenuation of winter record‐low temperature extremes in recent decades, establishing a theoretical reference for the attribution of changes in record‐breaking events under non‐stationary climate conditions.