2024: An amazing year of extreme weather and climate

From persistent drought in southern Africa and Central America earlier this year, to recent devastating extreme rainfall in Spain, to deadly Hurricane Helen along the East Coast of the United States, 2024 will bring billions of people closer to home. It was the year of climate change that affected our lives. of the people.

In a paper published in Advances in Atmospheric Science, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Wenxia Zhang of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, outlines the characteristics and impacts of this year’s most notable extreme events. , including rainfall and floods, tropical cyclones, and drought.

Additionally, they discuss its causes, the role of global warming, and the challenges we face in the future to become “climate resilient.” Dr Chan and her team have been conducting an annual survey of global climate extremes since 2022 and found that this year was characterized by extreme rainfall and flooding.

“Most extreme events have a large random element in that they are sensitive to weather fluctuations and occur when weather patterns set up in exactly the ‘right’ way. Some extreme events are more likely to occur when a large driver like ENSO has an impact. ‘local weather patterns,’ says study co-author Dr James Risby from CSIRO.

In particular, many of the extreme rainfall and drought events in 2024 were associated with atmospheric configurations associated with the El Niño winter of 2023/24. However, ENSO does not fully explain individual events.

In addition, studies of extreme event attribution, or “attribution science,” show that human-induced climate change, even before the industrial revolution, has often exacerbated extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones, and droughts. I know that I have let you. associated socio-economic impacts;

“The effects of climate change can be direct, through physical processes that cause extreme events, or indirect, through impacts on weather, large-scale drivers, and key baselines,” Dr Risby said. added.

“This is consistent with the basic physical understanding that anthropogenic warming leads to increased atmospheric moisture and evaporative demand, thus potentially increasing extreme rainfall and drought, respectively.”・Dr. Chan explains.

Despite understanding the reasons for the world’s increasingly strong and frequent extreme climate events, the research team behind this study says significant challenges remain in the knowledge and attribution of these phenomena. It makes it clear that. In particular, there are common discrepancies between observed and modeled extremes. This limits confidence in attribution results (especially in extreme rainfall events).

“To improve the attribution of extreme events, we need a deeper understanding of climate change,” said one of the study’s authors, Dr. Michael Brody of George Mason University (USA) and International University of Agriculture (Uzbekistan). says.

“More accurate attribution of extreme events is expected to aid decision-making, from post-disaster recovery to future preparedness.”

Another important angle to this yearly unfolding climate story is our ability to accurately predict the occurrence of extreme events, broadcast them, and act appropriately. Doing so could save many lives from floods and hurricanes like those seen in 2024.

“Some of the extreme events we witnessed in 2024, such as Hurricane Helen, were well predicted,” points out another member of the team, Dr. Zhuo Wang from the University of Illinois. “The devastating impacts also contributed to the vulnerability of communities that were poorly prepared for climate change.”

Dr Piotr Wolski from the University of Cape Town said: ‘Improving the quality of forecasts is important, but reducing the impact of extreme events requires ensuring that warnings are properly communicated and existing vulnerabilities are mitigated. It is more important to act on warnings.”

Dr Wolski’s comments refer to the idea of ​​’climate resilience’, which is rapidly becoming an important aspect of a holistic approach to climate change and its impacts on society.

As we move into an almost inevitable sense that this is our world now, there is a growing sense of what we can do to protect ourselves alongside how to prevent the problem in the first place.

As we saw after the devastating floods and landslides in Valencia, Spain, in October, it doesn’t take long for the effects of extreme weather to manifest in the frustration and anger of those affected. yeah.

We must not only work to better understand the causes of extreme weather events and climate, but also develop effective systems to better predict their occurrence and act quickly on the information we have. It is clear that the need is more urgent than ever.

Only then can we be better prepared for years like 2024.