Mediterranean Extreme Events in a changing climate on multiple spatiotemporal scales

Climate change is changing the statistics and the physics of extreme weather events, leading to increasing impacts from heavy precipitation, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and so on. Thus, attribution of extremes requires a process-based understanding of how large-scale forcing interacts with regional dynamics and thermodynamics. Despite significant progress at global scales, attribution of extremes at regional and local scales remains challenging, particularly in regions where small-scale processes dominate the generation of high-impact events.

The Mediterranean basin is a hotspot for climate change, characterized by land–sea interactions, complex orography, and convective activity. Extreme events in this region are often controlled by small-scale (1–10 km) processes, including atmospheric instability and convective organization. These processes are poorly represented in coarse-resolution climate models, limiting our ability to attribute observed impacts and to assess future risks.

The Mediterranean Extreme Events and Tipping elements in a changing climate on multiple spatiotemporal scales (MEET) project addresses this challenge through a process-oriented, high-resolution framework focused on Mediterranean extremes and their impacts. MEET will identify and classify historical and recent extreme events based on their impacts on key meteorological variables, such as precipitation intensity, near-surface temperature extremes, and damaging winds, and on associated societal and environmental consequences. Physics-informed decomposition techniques combined with advanced statistical methods will be applied to identify analog events across multiple spatiotemporal scales, enabling the detection of changes in event frequency, intensity, and spatial structure. A central component of MEET is the use of convection-permitting climate simulations to explicitly resolve the small-scale dynamics and thermodynamics underlying extreme events in both past and future climates. By linking high-resolution physical processes to observed impacts, MEET aims to advance the attribution of Mediterranean extreme events and to provide a physically consistent basis for improved regional risk assessment under ongoing climate change.

 

Acknowledgements

This research has been carried out with funding from the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIS-2 Call.