Search

The authors show that robust analyses of high-impact compound weather and climate events require many samples. Thus, they argue that large ensemble climate model simulations should be used to provide the best available information on climate risks.

The effects of climate extremes such as droughts or storms on the carbon cycle of ecosystems are investigated; such extremes can decrease regional carbon stocks.

How the conditions in soil layers below the surface change is not well understood. Here the authors assess changes in subsurface soil moisture, finding that these droughts also become more persistent and intense than surface droughts.

Compound climate events such as floods and droughts together can cause severe socio-economic impacts. Here, the authors analyse global hazard pairs from 1980–2014 and find global hotspots for the occurrence of compound events.

2024 saw multiple high-impact compound events. Record-breaking global temperatures combined with regional weather variability to create compound floods, spatially compounding droughts and heatwaves, and hazard sequences with often devastating impacts.

What a first year with temperature 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline implies for long-term temperature goals is unclear. Here the authors show that such a first year above the baseline is highly likely to occur within the first 20-year period with average warming of 1.5 °C.

This study finds that vegetation greening is expected to exacerbate compound soil drought-heat extreme events, as enhanced transpiration during the early growing season depletes soil moisture leading to deficits in the subsequent warm season.

Using a high-resolution model forced under a high emission scenario, the authors find an increase in subsurface marine heatwaves, and in concurrent surface and subsurface marine heatwaves, which can restrict refuge options of marine organisms.

An attribution analysis using observations, hydrological models and climate models suggests that both direct and lagged effects of climate warming contributed to Europe experiencing the highest observed water storage deficit in the satellite era during the widespread drought of 2022.

Using data from long-term nationwide observations and multi-level rainfall manipulative experiments, this study reveals that rice yield reductions due to extreme rainfall in China were comparable to those induced by extreme heat over the past two decades. Further projections highlight the increasing risk of rice yield reductions induced by extreme rainfall by the end of this century.

The combination of hot and dry conditions reduces crop yields through heat and drought stresses. The heat sensitivity of crops depends on the local strength of couplings between temperature and moisture, but how future climate will impact the temperature–moisture couplings remains unknown. On the basis of historical patterns and a suite of climate models, this study projects that climate change will modify the couplings and probably worsen the impacts of warming on some of the world’s most important crops.

Changes in air temperature are usually considered for quantifying changes in temperature extremes such as heatwaves. This study shows that the incidence of heat extremes in soils is increasing faster than air temperature in some regions, with implications for hydrological and biogeochemical processes.

This study attributes extreme precipitation scaling into thermodynamic versus dynamic components and further decomposes the thermodynamic effects into more detailed terms to reveal the physics of extreme precipitation under climate warming.

This study quantifies the scope, time scale, and physical mechanisms underlying the cascade effects of drying on heating and vice versa across the various ecosystems of the world.

The authors show increased negative extremes in gross primary productivity in northern midlatitude ecosystems, particularly over grasslands and croplands, attributed to impacts of warm droughts. This highlights the vulnerability of terrestrial carbon sinks and food security to increasing extreme events.

Co-occurring hot and dry extremes are predicted to increase with global warming. Changes in precipitation will modulate the extent of these changes, highlighting the importance of understanding regional precipitation trends to prepare society and minimize impacts.

Understanding the impact of future marine heatwaves on coastal ecosystems, which account for most of global fishery catches, is limited due to low-resolution models. Use of high-resolution models shows increases in intensity, and the number of days, of marine heatwaves, endangering resident species.

Soil moisture effects can substantially reduce photosynthesis and amplify the impacts of extreme events on primary production, potentially leading to biases in satellite-based estimates of photosynthesis, suggests an analysis of ground-based measurements.

A synthesis of global change experiments that manipulated temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide or nitrogen identifies a need to consider site-specific factors and interactions in Earth system models.

Extreme and compound events in lakes are increasing in severity and frequency in response to climate change and basin-scale anthropogenic stressors. This Review explores the occurrence, drivers and impact of such events, focusing on their physical and ecological drivers, impacts and management responses.

Bivariate Emergent Constraints can reduce soil moisture uncertainty by 7.87%, compared to temperature-based univariate constraints, but may worsen drying trends in arid and hyper-arid regions, according to a bivariate Emergent Constraints method, utilizing observed temperature and precipitation trends to constrain soil moisture changes.

Global heatwave days can be classified into sunny-humid, sunny-dry, advective, and adiabatic types, with sunny-dry days showing the most widespread increase from 2000 to 2020, causing carbon uptake reduction, while advective days increase human thermal stress, according to surface energy budget perturbations analysis.

Reduced snowmelt dominates northern Europe’s largest floods variation while heavy precipitation dominates western Europe flood events, according to a joint assessment of changes in the timing, spatial extent and volume of large floods.

Ecosystem productivity losses associated with hydroclimatic extremes increased in northern mid-latitudes but decreased in pantropic regions between 1982 and 2016, according to an analysis of gross primary production data from observations and models.

Compound events, events of significant impact that are caused by a combination of processes, are difficult to predict. This Perspective discusses the need for a systematic approach to improve risk assessment of these events.

Research on compound events has increased vastly in the last several years, yet, a typology was absent. This Review proposes a comprehensive classification scheme, incorporating compound events that are preconditioned, multivariate, temporally compounding and spatially compounding events.

The direct and seasonally-lagged effects of compound weather and climate events in spring on vegetation productivity vary with latitude and can amplify the effects of individual weather events, according to observationally-constrained estimates and process-based terrestrial ecosystem models.

Questions of causality are ubiquitous in Earth system sciences and beyond, yet correlation techniques still prevail. This Perspective provides an overview of causal inference methods, identifies promising applications and methodological challenges, and initiates a causality benchmark platform.

Several flood-heat-flood events associated with Omega atmospheric blocking have occurred since 1979 in Europe, including the most extreme September 2023 event, but a fully coupled Earth system model cannot generate spatial analogues as often as in reanalyses, according to an ensemble boosting analysis

Extreme weather and climate events could increase ecosystem disturbances and, potentially, destabilize ecosystems, but different feedbacks between climate and ecosystems are often not accounted for. This Perspective proposes a framework to characterize ecoclimatic events and understand the role of human activities in driving them.

The growth rate of global atmospheric CO₂ concentration is faster in drier years, independently of temperature; this relationship is underestimated in current carbon cycle models.

The impacts of extreme weather and climate can be amplified by physical interactions among events and across a complex set of societal factors. This Perspective discusses the concept and challenge of connected extreme events, exploring research approaches and decision-making strategies.

Ecosystem response to climate change will vary in amplitude and dynamically, which may not be captured in current experimental design. This Perspective presents experimental design improvements to better predict responses and thus facilitate understanding of future impacts.

Areas burned by fire decrease as pastures age and cropland advances, but fire activity increases before and after conversion of forests to pastures via deforestation in the Amazon-Cerrado region, according to an analysis of remotely-sensed data over the period 1986–2020.