Climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts pose increasing threats to human safety, economies, and ecosystems in a warming climate.
Climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts pose increasing threats to human safety, economies, and ecosystems in a warming climate. However, scientists still poorly understand their key drivers and future changes.
Recently, researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the spatiotemporal evolution of heatwaves globally and in China, identified the dominant driving factors, and assessed the associated compound risks.
Using a gridded daily maximum and minimum temperature dataset from the China Meteorological Administration, the team found that the frequency of both daytime and nighttime heatwaves increased significantly across most areas of China from 1961 to 2022. Furthermore, surface air temperature was identified as the dominant drivers of the increase in heatwaves in China using redundancy analysis and hierarchical partitioning methods.
Because compound heatwave and drought events exert more severe impacts than individual extremes, further analysis revealed that surface air temperature has a stronger impact on compound extremes than on heatwaves alone. Moreover, population growth, together with intensifying compound extremes, led to moderate increases in exposure during 1991–2020.
Read More: Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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