Understanding and Attribution of Extreme Heat and Drought Events in 2022: Current Situation and Future Challenges

Abstract

Extreme weather events and their consequential impacts have been a key feature of the climate in recent years in many parts of the world, with many partly attributed to ongoing global-scale warming. The past year, 2022, has been no exception, with further records being broken. The year was marked by unprecedented heatwaves and droughts with highly unusual spatial extent, duration and intensity, with one measure indicating an aggregated and overall intensity of extreme heat events worldwide not seen since at least 1950. The extreme drought measured by surface soil moisture covered 47.3% of global land areas in 2022, which was the second most widespread year since 1980. Here, we examine notable events of the year in five major regions of the world: China’s Yangtze River region, western Europe, the western U.S., the Horn of Africa and central South America. For each event, we review the potential roles of circulation, oceanic forcing (especially the “triple-dip” La Niña) and anthropogenic climate change, with an aim of understanding the extreme events in 2022 from a global perspective. This will serve as a reference for mechanism understanding, prediction and attribution of extreme events.