Human-induced climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of many weather and climate hazards, including heatwaves and humid heat, droughts, floods and heavy precipitation, windstorms, tropical cyclones, and wildfires, often with severe societal impacts. Yet the confidence with which observed changes can be attributed to anthropogenic influence still varies between hazard types, as does climate models’ ability to reproduce observed extreme events. Both limit our ability to project future risks at different warming levels.

Understanding and projecting changes in these emerging hazards, including unprecedented, compound, consecutive, flash-change, and seasonally-shifting extremes, as well as their interaction with exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation, is a challenge that spans the physical sciences, statistics and machine learning, climate risk modelling, geography, and the socioeconomic sciences. The sheer number of recent extreme events underlines the urgency of improved understanding and modelling capacities for better adaptation, policymaking, and early warning systems.

This session highlights recent progress on understanding, modelling, and projecting weather and climate hazards across these disciplines and aims to identify open research questions and form new collaborations. Which hazards receive too little attention compared to, e.g., heat and drought, and which regions remain under-studied? Which sectors should work more closely with weather and climate scientists to make progress?

We invite contributions on changing weather and climate hazards and their impacts from all regions of the world. Studies on floods, storms, humid heat, and other hazards less represented in the literature are particularly welcome, as are contributions including, but not limited to:
- Understanding physical processes associated with weather extremes, including unprecedented, compound, consecutive, flash-change, and seasonality-related extremes
- Teleconnections and natural modes of variability as well as their links to hazards and impacts
- Advances in hazard and impact modelling, including bias-adjustments and data-driven approaches
- Detection and attribution of weather and climate hazards and their impacts
- Storyline and other approaches to low-likelihood, high-impact events
- Trends and projections of hazards on decadal to centennial timescales
- Changing exposure and vulnerability; interactions between hazards, local socioeconomics, & adaptation