Southwestern China (SWC) has suffered from increasing frequency of heat wave (HW) in recent summers. While the local drought-HW connection is one obvious mechanism for this change, remote controls remain to be explored. Based on ERA-5 reanalysis, it is found that the SWC summer HWs are significantly correlated with sea-ice …
Climate extremes, such as droughts or heat waves, can lead to harvest failures and threaten the livelihoods of agricultural producers and the food security of communities worldwide. Improving our understanding of their impacts on crop yields is crucial to enhance the resilience of the global food system. This study analyses, …
Extreme climate events such as droughts and heat waves exert strong impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Estimations of the risks of climate extremes typically focus on one variable in isolation. In this study, we present a method to examine the likelihood of concurrent extreme temperature and precipitation modes at …
Although natural terrestrial ecosystems have sequestered ~25% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, the long-term sustainability of this key ecosystem service is under question. Forests have traditionally been viewed as robust carbon (C) sinks; however, extreme heat-waves, drought and wildfire have increased tree mortality, particularly in widespread semi-arid regions, which account for …
Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate risks due to their agglomeration of people, buildings and infrastructure. Differences in methodology, hazards considered, and climate models used limit the utility and comparability of climate studies on individual cities. Here we assess, for the first time, future changes in flood, heat-waves (HW), and …
Green areas induce smaller increases in the air temperature than built-up areas. They can offer a solution to mitigating the urban heat island impacts during heat waves, since the cool air generated by a park is diffused into its immediate surroundings through forced or natural convection. The purpose of this …
The combined effects of rising heat and humidity will affect India's northeast the most in the world close to the end of the century, warns this new study published in Environmental Research Letters. As a result of global increases in both temperature and specific humidity, heat stress is projected to …
Heatwaves with large impacts have increased in the recent past and will continue to increase under future warming. However, the implication for population exposure to severe heatwaves remains unexplored. Here, we characterize maximum potential human exposure (without passive/active reduction measures) to severe heatwaves in India. We show that if the …
The risk associated with any climate change impact reflects intensity of natural hazard and level of human vulnerability. Previous work has shown that a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C can be considered an upper limit on human survivability. On the basis of an ensemble of high-resolution climate change simulations, we project …
Rising global temperatures are causing increases in the frequency and severity of extreme climatic events, such as floods, droughts, and heat waves. We analyze changes in summer temperatures, the frequency, severity, and duration of heat waves, and heat-related mortality in India between 1960 and 2009 using data from the India …
Heat waves and drought are often considered the most damaging climatic stressors for wheat. In this study, we characterize and attribute the effects of these climate extremes on wheat yield anomalies (at global and national scales) from 1980 to 2010. Using a combination of up-to-date heat wave and drought indexes …
Assessing geographic variability in heat wave vulnerability forms the basis for planning appropriate targeted adaptation strategies. Given several recent deadly heatwaves in India, heat is increasingly being recognized as a public health problem. However, to date there has not been a country-wide assessment of heat vulnerability in India. We evaluated …
The purpose of this article is to show the extreme temperature regime of heat waves across Africa over recent years (1981–2015). Heat waves have been quantified using the Heat Wave Magnitude Index daily (HWMId), which merges the duration and the intensity of extreme temperature events into a single numerical index. …
It has been argued that climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. The extreme high temperatures of the summer of 2003 were associated with up to seventy thousand excess deaths across Europe. Previous studies have attributed the meteorological event to the human influence on climate, …
By 2050, India is likely to experience a temperature rise of 1-4°C; rainfall will increase by 9-16 per cent. This will have a detrimental effect on farmers in more than half of the country. Assessing vulnerability to climate change and variability is an important first step in evolving appropriate adaptation …
Over India, heat waves occur during the summer months of April to June. A gridded daily temperature data set for the period, 1961–2013 has been analyzed to examine the variability and trends in heat waves over India. For identifying heat waves, the Excess Heat Factor (EHF) and 90th percentile of …
Heat waves and the consequent heat stress of urban populations have a growing relevance in urban risk management and strategies of urban adaptation to climate change. In this context, social science studies on subjective experiencing of heat as stress by urban citizens are a new emerging field. To contribute to …
India suffers from major heatwaves during March-June. The rising trend of number of intense heatwaves in recent decades has been vaguely attributed to global warming. Since the heat waves have a serious effect on human mortality, root causes of these heatwaves need to be clarified. Based on the observed patterns …
The effects of type 1 and type 2 diabetes on the body's physiological response to thermal stress is a relatively new topic in research. Diabetes tends to place individuals at greater risk for heat-related illness during heat waves and physical activity due to an impaired capacity to dissipate heat. Specifically, …
In recent decades there has been an increase in magnitude and occurrence of heat waves and a decrease of cold waves which are possibly related to the anthropogenic influence (Solomon et al., 2007). This study describes the extreme temperature regime of heat waves and cold waves across South America over …
