Revealing Probabilistic Patterns of Climate Extremes and Impacts Through Emulator-Based Risk Analysis

Traditional earth system model ensembles provide valuable information on climate extremes. However, their limited size often underrepresents rare high-impact events, restricting the ability to explore extreme outcomes and large-scale anomaly patterns. Using the climate emulator MESMER, trained on CMIP6 models, together with the risk assessment platform CLIMADA, we assess population exposure to annual maximum daily temperatures and asset exposure to annual maximum daily precipitation.

MESMER generates virtually unlimited, spatially explicit, global climate realizations for any scenario defined by emission or global-mean-temperature trajectories. This allows us to characterize the spread of potential outcomes and associated spatial patterns, identify rare high-impact realizations, compare results with standard CMIP6 ensembles, or explore custom scenarios beyond existing model experiments.

We illustrate spatial and temporal patterns of exposure for temperature and precipitation extremes, highlighting contrasting regional responses and how highly impactful outcomes can emerge from climate variability.