Inequality in human exposure to future climate extremes.

Future climate extremes are expected to worsen existing inequalities in human exposure, yet the specific disparities across income groups are not well understood. We investigate how future floods, heatwaves, droughts, and compound hot-dry events will impact high- and low-income countries under various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). We find that low-income countries are projected to experience more severe exposure to these events, primarily due to accelerated population growth rather than climate change.

Weakening of global terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity under increasing intensity of warm extremes.

The net ecosystem exchange (NEE), determining terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity, is strongly controlled by climate change and has exhibited substantial year-to-year fluctuations. How the increased frequency and intensity of warm extremes affect NEE variations remains unclear. Here, we combined multiple NEE datasets from atmospheric CO inversions, Earth system models, eddy-covariance data-driven methods and climate datasets to show that the terrestrial carbon sequestration capacity is weakened during warm extreme occurrences over the past 40 years, primarily contributed by tropical regions (81% ± 48%).

Author Correction: Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability.

The hydrological cycle is expected to intensify with global warming, which likely increases the intensity of extreme precipitation events and the risk of flooding. The changes, however, often differ from the theorized expectation of increases in water-holding capacity of the atmosphere in the warmer conditions, especially when water availability is limited. Here, the relationships of changes in extreme precipitation and flood intensities for the end of the twenty-first century with spatial and seasonal water availability are quantified.

Satellite-based data driven quantification of pluvial floods over Europe under future climatic and socioeconomic changes.

Flooding is one of the major threats jeopardizing lives and properties of the people, and its risk is expected to increase remarkably under changing climatic and socioeconomic conditions. Yet, future flood risk has not been well studied due primarily to a limited availability of detailed and consistent data on future vulnerability components and the computationally expensive continental flood modeling. Here we perform a top-down data driven flood risk assessment for 20-, 30-, 50- and 100-year return periods over Europe at the continental, regional and national levels for the late 21st century.

Lagged influence of Atlantic and Pacific climate patterns on European extreme precipitation.

The risk of European extreme precipitation and flooding as an economic and humanitarian disaster is modulated by large-scale atmospheric processes that operate over (multi-)decadal periods and transport huge quantities of moisture inland from the oceans. Yet the previous studies for better understanding of extreme precipitation variability and its skillful seasonal prediction are far from comprehensive. Here we show that the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and, to a lesser extent, winter ENSO signal have a controlling influence not only concurrently on European extreme precipitation anomaly in winter, but in a delayed way on the extremes in the following seasons.

Seasonally varying footprint of climate change on precipitation in the Middle East.

Climate change is expected to alter precipitation patterns; however, the amplitude of the change may broadly differ across seasons. Combining different seasons may mask contrasting climate change signals in individual seasons, leading to weakened signals and misleading impact results. A realistic assessment of future climate change is of great importance for arid regions, which are more vulnerable to any change in extreme events as their infrastructure is less experienced or not well adapted for extreme conditions.

Application of PSO algorithm in short-term optimization of reservoir operation.

The optimization of the operation of existing water systems such as dams is very important for water resource planning and management especially in arid and semi-arid lands. Due to budget and operational water resource limitations and environmental problems, the operation optimization is gradually replaced by new systems. The operation optimization of water systems is a complex, nonlinear, multi-constraint, and multidimensional problem that needs robust techniques.

Long-term variations of water quality parameters in the Maroon River, Iran.

Sixteen water quality parameters have been monitored at four stations located along the Maroon River during 1989-2008. The trend analysis was performed on seasonal and annual time-scales using the Mann-Kendall test, the Sen's slope estimator and the linear regression. The relationships of the water quality parameters to river discharge were also investigated.