Complex interactions of extreme events in Southern Europe and Brazil: a compound event perspective

Record-breaking natural hazards occur regularly throughout the world, leading to a variety of impacts [1]. According to the WMO, since 1970 there were more than 11000 reported disasters attributed to these hazards globally, with just over 2 million deaths and US$ 3.64 trillion in losses [2]. From 1970 to 2019, weather, climate and water hazards accounted for 50% of all disasters, 45% of all reported deaths and 74% of all reported economic losses [2]. Droughts and heatwaves are both included in the top 4 disasters in terms of human losses [2], with uneven impacts throughout the world and a high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing will increase economic inequality between countries [3].

Nowadays there is strong evidence that droughts and heatwaves are at times synergetic and that their combined occurrence is largely caused by land-atmosphere feedbacks [4]. In fact, increasing trends of Compound Dry and Hot (CDH) events have been observed in both South America [5,6] and Europe [7,8], some of them with aggravated impacts. Specifically, the severe 2020 Pantanal extreme fire season (Brazil) resulted from the interplay between extreme and persistent temperatures (maximum temperatures 6 ºC above-average) and long-term soil dryness conditions [6]. Similarly, in the Iberian Peninsula, CDH events were shown to have an influence on the dramatic 2017 fire season [9] and also on crop losses [8]. Moreover, future climate projections suggest that CDH conditions are expected to become more common in a warming climate [4]. Therefore, it is very important to address weather events in a compound manner, identifying synergies, driving mechanisms and dominant atmospheric modes controlling single and combined hazards.

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[9] Ribeiro A.F.S. et al. (2020) Risk of crop failure due to compound dry and hot extremes estimated with nested copulas. Biogeosciences, 17, 4815–4830

[10] Turco M. et al. (2019) Climate drivers of the 2017 devastating fires in Portugal. Sci. Rep., 9, 1

 

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal) under projects PTDC/CTA-CLI/28902/2017, JPIOCEANS/0001/2019 and FCT- UIDB/50019/2020 –IDL.