Dependence of drivers affects risks associated with compound events

By Jakob Zscheischler, Sonia I. Seneviratne. Science Advances, 2017

773 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Compound extremely hot and dry summers become more frequent with higher CO2 concentrations due to stronger interdependence. Compound climate extremes are receiving increasing attention because of their disproportionate impacts on humans and ecosystems. However, risks assessments generally focus on univariate statistics. We analyze the co-occurrence of hot and dry summers and show that these are correlated, inducing a much higher frequency of concurrent hot and dry summers than what would be assumed from the independent combination of the univariate statistics. Our results demonstrate how the dependence structure between variables affects the occurrence frequency of multivariate extremes. Assessments based on univariate statistics can thus strongly underestimate risks associated with given extremes, if impacts depend on multiple (dependent) variables. We conclude that a multivariate perspective is necessary to appropriately assess changes in climate extremes and their impacts and to design adaptation strategies.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/04a9890917e16cc92ae70b48d1597a9fc3f0d653

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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

The effect of univariate bias adjustment on multivariate hazard estimates (2019, background): “…bias in the dependence structure between climate variables is therefore not adjusted, even though climate models may not capture dependencies between climate drivers very well, for instance the correlation between temperature and precipitation in summer (Zscheischler and Seneviratne, 2017).”
The effects of climate extremes on global agricultural yields (2019, background): “Related to this, the relative contributions of temperature and precipitation anomalies to drought are difficult to disentangle—low rainfall and high temperatures both increase drought severity and are often significantly correlated (Trenberth and Shea 2005, Zscheischler and Seneviratne 2017).”
Quantifying impacts of the 2018 drought on European ecosystems in comparison to 2003 (2019, background): “(Zscheischler and Seneviratne, 2017).”
Changes in the severity of compound drought and hot extremes over global land areas (2018, methodology): “The past decade has witnessed a surge in the study of compound dry and hot extremes in terms of their causative mechanisms, variabilities and impacts (Zscheischler and Seneviratne 2017, Hao et al 2018).”
Coupling between the terrestrial carbon and water cycles—a review (2019, background): “…co-occurs with high VPD due to reduced latent heat and enhanced sensible heat, so that droughts (conditions of low soil moisture and high aridity—VPD) should really be considered as compound events, i.e. as co-occurring (Zscheischler and Seneviratne 2017, Zhou et al 2018, Zscheischler et al 2018).”
Land–atmospheric feedbacks during droughts and heatwaves: state of the science and current challenges (2018, background): “50–52 (1) What is the large-scale response of land evaporation to rainfall deficits and extreme heat in different natural and anthropogenic ecosystems? (2) How does this response regulate the state of the atmospheric boundary layer and thus intensify or buffer the event locally? (3) How do land surf”
Increased probability of compound long-duration dry and hot events in Europe during summer (1950–2013) (2019, methodology): “Considering such extremes as independent of one another can result in an underestimation in the probability of their cooccurrence (Zscheischler and Seneviratne 2017), as well as in the risk of low crop yields (Zscheischler et al 2017), and the probability of wildfires (Gudmundsson et al 2014,…”