Increasing Risks of Future Compound Climate Extremes With Warming Over Global Land Masses

AbstractCompound climate extremes (here referred to compound dryhot events and compound pluvialhot events) result in devastating disasters which threaten waterfoodenergy security. However, in a warming scenario, the risk of occurrence, the quantification of uncertainty, and associated drivers of compound climate extremesparticularly compound pluvialhot eventshave not been fully explored. By leveraging climate model large ensembles, it is revealed that the risk of compound climate extremes is projected to increase 23 times over most global land masses in future Representative Concentration Pathway(RCP) 8.5 forcing compared with historical forcing. Increased risks of compound climate extremes are mainly attributed to the changes in temperature and changes in dependence between precipitation and temperature, while the change in precipitation contributing to risk of these two compound climate extremes exhibits approximately spatial complementary. In the warming world, the hot spots of compound dryhot extremes mainly lie in Europe, South Africa, and the Amazon, while those of compound pluvialhot extremes mostly lie in the eastern USA, eastern and southern Asia, Australia, and central Africa. These findings help stakeholders and decision makers develop a package of climate change adaptation strategies to manage and mitigate the risk of compound climate extremes.

Increasing Risks of Future Compound Climate Extremes With Warming Over Global Land Masses Academic Article