Fig. 2: Components in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) pipeline for extreme events.

AI mainly exploits spatio-temporal Earth observation, reanalysis, and climate data to answer “what”-questions (top row): detection of events, prediction, and impact assessment. AI can also be used for understanding events and thus answer “what if,” “why,” and “how sure” questions (middle row) and makes use of explainable AI (XAI) to identify relevant drivers of events, causality to understanding the system, estimate causal effects and impacts, and imagine counterfactual scenarios for attribution and uncertainty estimation to quantify trust and robustness for decision-making. Communicating extreme events and their impacts can benefit from statistical/machine learning (bottom row) by improving operationalization, ensuring fair and equitable narratives, and integrating language models in situation rooms for enhanced decision-making.