Leading meteorologists analyzed the extreme, successive cold events in North America and East Asia in November and December 2022 to improve prediction models and mitigate future economic loss and casualties caused by cold surges.
Climate models were not doing a good job of predicting how spring rainfall was changing over China’s northeast, the country’s breadbasket region, potentially threatening food security, even though these same models were working just fine elsewhere. Researchers have now found what was missing from their understanding.
Extreme heatwaves are likely to increase in frequency and severity, researchers report in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, largely due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The finding comes the day after the United Kingdom records its hottest ever temperature and a year after an unprecedented North American heatwave doubled average temperatures and resulted in nearly 1,500 deaths.
The fresh occurrence of a fresh sea-ice extent minimum in such a short period of time drove a group of researchers at Sun Yat-sen University and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) in China set out to find out what had occurred and why.