Weather and Climate Extremes in 2023 Affect the Globe with Emerging Features----Chinese Academy of Sciences

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Weather and Climate Extremes in 2023 Affect the Globe with Emerging Features

Apr 17, 2024

Globally, last year was the warmest in thousands of years, with the global average temperature of at least 1.45 ℃ above pre-industrial levels. The year also saw an unprecedented a string of extreme weather and climate events in many parts of the world, including heat waves, torrential rains, transitions from drought to floods, wildfires and sandstorms.

One year later, scientists from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Met Office in the United Kingdom, Sorbonne Université in France, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, the Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología Y Ciencias Ambientales in Argentina, and the Shanghai Typhoon Institute of the China Meteorological Administration, have taken stock.

They reviewed the facts and current physical understanding of the year's events, and have put them in context relative to the past and future, to provide a better understanding of the role of internal climate variability and anthropogenic climate change.

Results were published as a News & Views paper in Advances in Atmospheric Science on April 17.

The scientists highlighted emerging features associated with many of the events of 2023, including heat extremes occurring earlier in the year, and increasingly simultaneously in different parts of the world. For example, cyclones exacerbated extreme precipitation in northern China in July and in Libya in September.

Meanwhile, multi-year droughts in California and the Horn of Africa have turned into floods. Ecosystems have also come under immense pressure from wildfires, such as in Hawaii and Canada, which have caused widespread damage and threatened carbon dioxide reduction targets aimed at limiting future warming.

"Many of the events in 2023 are consistent with projected future changes in a warmer world, showing the challenges ahead, while some were surprising, suggesting there's still more to learn about what's potentially around the corner," said Dr. ZHANG Wenxia, lead author of the study.

One is the changing seasonality of extreme events. "We're seeing extremes occur in seasons when they're normally less likely to occur. For example, in the spring of 2023, heat waves appeared in southwestern Europe, Brazil, Morocco, and South Africa," said Dr. Robin Clark of the Met Office, a co-author of the study.

Last year has also showed a very worrying signal about the transitions between droughts and floods, an area of science that needs more research, which is also needed to provide better warnings, such as those to be covered by a UN initiative, "Early Warnings for All", which aims to provide warnings worldwide by 2027. Dr. LI Chao, another co-author said: "Good warning systems will be an essential part of helping the world to cope with the coming onslaught of events in the coming decades."