Laura Suarez-Gutierrez

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Institute of Atmosphere and Climate Science

We use the 100-member Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble (MPI-GE) to disentangle the contributions from colocated dynamic atmospheric conditions and local thermodynamic effects of moisture limitation as drivers of variability in European summer heat extremes. Using a novel extreme event definition, we find that heat extremes with respect to the ev...

We evaluate how hotspots of different types of extreme summertime heat change under global warming increase of up to \(4\,^\circ \hbox {C}\); and which level of global warming allows us to avert the risk of these hotspots considering the irreducible range of possibilities defined by well-sampled internal variability. We use large samples of low-pro...

We use a methodological framework exploiting the power of large ensembles to evaluate how well ten coupled climate models represent the internal variability and response to external forcings in observed historical surface temperatures. This evaluation framework allows us to directly attribute discrepancies between models and observations to biases...

Societally relevant weather impacts typically result from compound events, which are rare combinations of weather and climate drivers. Focussing on four event types arising from different combinations of climate variables across space and time, here we illustrate that robust analyses of compound events — such as frequency and uncertainty analysis u...

Extreme heat and drought typical of an end-of-century climate could soon occur over Europe, and repeatedly. Despite the European climate being potentially prone to multi-year successive extremes due to the influence of the North Atlantic variability, it remains unclear how the likelihood of successive extremes changes under warming, how early they...

This review article provides a synthesis and perspective on how weather and climate extreme events can play a role in influencing tipping elements and triggering tipping points in the Earth System. An example of a potential critical global tipping point, induced by climate extremes in an increasingly warmer climate, is Amazon rainforest dieback tha...

Compound wind and precipitation (CWP) extremes often cause severe impacts on human society and ecosystems, such as damage to agricultural crops and infrastructure. High regional frequencies of CWP extremes across multiple regions in the same winter, referred to as spatially compounding events, can further impact the global economy and the reinsuran...

Northeast Asia experienced unprecedented abrupt warming in the 1990s since the last century. Based on a robust time series and rank frequency evaluation, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Grand Ensembles of CMIP5 (MPI-GE5), CMIP6 (MPI-GE6), EC-Earth3 and IPSL-CM6A-LR were identified as the models that best simulate the external forcing and i...

The internal variability of European summer temperatures has been linked to various mechanisms on seasonal to sub- and multi-decadal timescales. We find that sub-decadal timescales dominate summer temperature variability over large parts of the continent and determine mechanisms controlling extremely warm summers on sub-decadal timescales. We show...

Single‐model initial‐condition large ensembles are powerful tools to quantify the forced response, internal climate variability, and their evolution under global warming. Here, we present the CMIP6 version of the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble (MPI‐GE CMIP6) with currently 30 realizations for the historical period and five emission scenarios....

Very large volcanic eruptions have substantial impacts on the climate, causing global cooling and major changes to the hydrological cycle. While most studies have focused on changes to mean climate, here we use a large ensemble to assess the impact on extreme climate for three years following tropical and extratropical eruptions of different sulfur...

The European continent is regularly affected by a wide range of extreme events and natural hazards including heatwaves, extreme precipitation, droughts, cold spells, windstorms, and storm surges. Many of these events do not occur as single extreme events, but rather show a multivariate character, the so-called compound events. Within the scope of t...

Drought and heat events are becoming more frequent in Europe due to human-induced climate change, affecting many aspects of human well-being and ecosystem functioning. However, the intensity of these drought and heat events is not spatially and temporally uniform. Understanding the spatial variability of drought impacts is important information for...

The summer of 2018 was an extraordinary season in climatological terms for northern and central Europe, bringing simultaneous, widespread, and concurrent heat and drought extremes in large parts of the continent with extensive impacts on agriculture, forests, water supply, and the socio-economic sector. Here, we present a comprehensive, multi-facet...

Single-model initial-condition large ensembles are powerful tools to quantify the forced response, internal climate variability, and their evolution under global warming. Here, we present the CMIP6 version of the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble (MPI-GE CMIP6) with 30 realisations for the historical period and five emission scenarios. The power...

The internal variability of European summer temperatures has been linked to various mechanisms on seasonal to sub- and multi-decadal timescales. We find that sub-decadal time scales dominate summer temperature variability over large parts of the continent, and the mechanisms controlling such sub-decadal variations remain unexplored. Extremely warm...

Extreme heat and drought levels typical of an end-of-century climate could occur swiftly, and repeatedly. Despite the European climate being potentially prone to multi-year successive extremes due to the influence of the North Atlantic variability, it remains unclear how the likelihood of such successive extremes changes under warming, how early th...

The summer of 2018 was an extraordinary season in climatological terms for northern and central Europe, bringing simultaneous, widespread, and concurrent heat and drought extremes in large parts of the continent with extensive impacts on agriculture, forests, water supply, and socio-economic sector. We present a comprehensive, multi-faceted analysi...

Most societally relevant weather impacts result from compound events, that is, rare combinations of weather and climate drivers. Focussing on four event types arising from different combinations of climate variables across space and time, we illustrate that robust analyses of compound events – such as frequency and uncertainty analysis under presen...

Increases in climate hazards and their impacts mark one of the major challenges of climate change. Situations in which hazards occur close enough to one another to result in amplified impacts, because systems are insufficiently resilient or because hazards themselves are made more severe, are of special concern. We consider projected changes in suc...

Humid heat presents a major societal challenge through its impacts on human health, energy demand, and economic productivity, underlined by the projected emergence of conditions beyond human tolerance. However, systematic assessment of what drives the most extreme humid heat worldwide has been lacking. Here, we investigate factors determining the l...

We use a decadal prediction system with the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) version of the coupled Max Planck Institute Earth System Model (MPI-ESM-HR) to predict the probability of occurrence for extremely warm summers in the Northern Hemisphere. An assimilation run with MPI-ESM-HR shows a robust response of summer temperatur...

Abstract The Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble (MPI‐GE) is the largest ensemble of a single comprehensive climate model currently available, with 100 members for the historical simulations (1850–2005) and four forcing scenarios. It is currently the only large ensemble available that includes scenario representative concentration pathway (RCP) 2.6...

We use the 100-member Grand Ensemble with the climate model MPI-ESM to evaluate the controllability of mean and extreme European summer temperatures with the global mean temperature targets in the Paris Agreement. We find that European summer temperatures at 2 °C of global warming are on average 1 °C higher than at 1.5 °C of global warming with res...

We explore the extent to which internal variability can reconcile discrepancies between observed and simulated warming in the upper tropical troposphere. We compare all extant radiosonde-based estimates for the period 1958–2014 to simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 multimodel ensemble and the 100 realization Max Plan...