Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research | PIK

In the light of observed variability in precipitation patterns, there is a growing need for comprehensive data mining of regularly updated rainfall recording databases. Therefore, an analysis of heavy rainfall and hyetographs was conducted using a 30-year high-resolution dataset from 100 rain gauges across Poland, covering 31 646 rainfall events. D...

Despite contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have the potential to drive global mitigation actions by advocating for ambitious emission reduction targets, promoting renewable energy solutions, and advancing sustainable development practices. The adoption of onshore-offshore wind a...

Aedes sp. mosquitoes are changing their geographic range in response to climate change. This is of concern because these mosquitoes can carry dengue fever and other viral diseases. Changing weather patterns can also increase the numbers of Aedes mosquitoes, leading to greater human exposure and enhancing population health risks. We project the geog...

Drought has a paramount impact on global agriculture and food security. However, the study on future cropland areas that can incur drought is inadequate. This paper uses input parameters from 7 CMIP6 models for 7 future scenarios (SSP1‐1.9, SSP1‐2.6, SSP4‐3.4, SSP2‐4.5, SSP4‐6.0, SSP3‐7.0, and SSP5‐8.5) to measure South Asian cropland exposure to d...

(1) Anatomy of a plagiarized review. (2) List of 40 identified, plagiarised reviews. (3) Basic metadata from 50 reviews. (4) ChatGPT experiment #1. (5) ChatGPT experiment #2.

The phenomenon of plagiarism in peer-review evaluation reports remained surprisingly unrecognized, despite a notable rise of such cases in recent years. This study reports multiple cases of peer-review plagiarism recently detected in 50 different scientific articles published in 19 journals. Their in-depth analysis reveals that such reviews tend to...

Floods are the main natural disaster in Poland, and the risk of both fluvial and pluvial floods is serious in the country. Pluvial floods are on the rise in the changing climate, particularly in increasingly sealed urbanized areas. In this paper, we examine the changes in flood risk in Poland, discussing the mechanisms, observations, projections an...

Huge amounts of carbon being sequestered in forest ecosystems make them an important land carbon sink at the global scale. Their ability to withdraw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, whose concentration is gradually increasing due to anthropogenic emissions, renders them important natural climate-mitigation solutions. The urgent need for tr...

Hydrometeorological variability, such as changes in extreme precipitation, snowmelt, or soil moisture excess, in Poland can lead to fluvial flooding. In this study we employed the dataset covering components of the water balance with a daily time step at the sub-basin level over the country for 1952-2020. The data set was derived from the previousl...

Under climate change, land use has an essential effect on the carbon cycle in the climate change sensitive area of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP). This study about ambitions to check out the spatial and temporal patterns of carbon storage (CS) on the QTP under future land-use changes and their influencing factors. Based on historical and projected cli...

Poland is characterized by hydrometeorological variability, where conditions such as snowmelt, extreme precipitation, or soil moisture excess could be the main natural mechanisms causing fluvial flooding. The interplay of these factors may be additionally modified by climate change. Therefore, it is of high interest to attribute the occurrence of f...

The ongoing debate on global climate change has polarized societies since ever. The attitude of an individual towards its anthropogenic nature as well as the need and extent to which human beings should mitigate climate warming can result from a number of factors. Also, since the consequences of such alteration in global climate have no borders and...

Understanding the main drivers of runoff components and contributions of precipitation and temperature have important implications for water-limited inland basins, where snow and glacier melt provide essential inputs to surface runoff. To quantify the impact of temperature and precipitation changes on river runoff in the Tarim River basin (TRB), th...

The aim of this paper is accurately framed in its title: Are pluvial and fluvial (river) floods on the rise? First, physical mechanisms that drive changes in hazard of pluvial and fluvial floods were examined. Then, a review of literature was undertaken on detection and an attribution of changes in hazard of pluvial and fluvial floods in observatio...

This report contains Supplementary Information, namely, mathematical derivations, justifications and illustrations, for the paper series Revisiting causality using stochastics (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022a,b) and in particular its first part, Theory (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022a). It comprises three sections, namely Relationship of continuous- and di...

This report contains Supplementary Information, namely, mathematical derivations, justifications and illustrations, for the paper series Revisiting causality using stochastics and in particular its second part, Applications (Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022b). It comprises three sections, namely Assessment of uncertainty in the identification of the impu...

Study Region Poland (representative sample of 146 flow gauges free of major human modifications , located in 12 major river basins) Study Focus The objective was to present trends in selected river flood indicators (magnitude, frequency and timing) in Poland, using the annual maximum daily flow and peak-overthreshold approaches. Two periods (195...

In a companion paper, we develop the theoretical background of a stochastic approach to causality with the objective of formulating necessary conditions that are operationally useful in identifying or falsifying causality claims. Starting from the idea of stochastic causal systems, the approach extends it to the more general concept of hen-or-egg c...

Causality is a central concept in science, in philosophy and in life. However, reviewing various approaches to it over the entire knowledge tree, from philosophy to science and to scientific and technological applications, we locate several problems, which prevent these approaches from defining sufficient conditions for the existence of causal link...

This book is the product of a worldwide collaboration among UN water resources programs, prominent national water resources operating agencies and selected academic specialists. It deals directly with some of the most difficult problems water engineers, managers and decision makers face when designing and implementing water resources infrastructure...

China has experienced a huge socioeconomic advancement over the past few decades, resulting in great change in land use and land cover. To date, negligible attention has been given to examining the socioeconomic changes in the context of land-use change,

Motivated by the Paris Agreement, this study aims to investigate the changes in precipitation extremes across South Asia and its five climatic zones for each 0.5 °C of warming above the pre-industrial level from 1.5 °C to 3.0 °C. In this regard, 20 global climate model outputs from the latest CMIP6 under four combinations of SSP-RCP scenarios (SSP1...

The European Commission Flood Risk Directive review shows that while many nations have embraced the concepts of flood risk management, there is still quite more to do in delineating risk–cost-effective measures and developing cost estimates and financing of those measures. Not mentioned are the necessary changes to existing design standards and pro...

The floods caused by the extreme precipitation in the Yangtze River basin (YRB) and Murray-Darling River basin (MDRB), the largest basins in China and Australia, have significant impacts on the society and regional economies. Based on the spatial-temporal analysis of the daily precipitation extremes (DPEs) during 1982–2016, we found that for both b...

The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive review and characterization of selected climate variability indices. While we discuss many major climate variability mechanisms, we focus on four principal modes of climate variability related to the dynamics of Earth’s oceans and their interactions with the atmosphere: the El Niño–Southern...

The coincidence of floods and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) is a genuine multihazard problem. Since the beginning of 2020, many regions around the World have been experiencing this double hazard of serious flooding and the pandemic. There have been 70 countries with flood events occurring after detection of the country's first COVID‐19 case a...

Having published some hundreds of papers over decades and having been co-editors of Hydrological Sciences Journal (HSJ) for a long time (ZWK for 18 years, DK for 12 years), we have been interested in the peer-review system. Trying to diagnose its pathologies and suggest remedies, we have written several editorials published in HSJ (Kundzewicz and K...

The review comments that resulted in rejection of the paper “Hen-or-egg causality: Atmospheric CO₂ and temperature” by the Science of the Total Environment, along with the submission letter and the rejection letter, are seen in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343879018. Here, as a rebuttal to the review comments, we post the relevant part...

This paper introduces the Special Issue (SI) “How evaluation of hydrological models influences results of climate impact assessment.” The main objectives were as follows: (a) to test a comprehensive model calibration/validation procedure, consisting of five steps, for regional-scale hydrological models; (b) to evaluate performance of global-scale h...

This study aimed to investigate the influence of hydrological model calibration/validation on discharge projections for three large river basins (the Rhine, Upper Mississippi and Upper Yellow). Three hydrological models (HMs), which have been firstly calibrated against the monthly discharge at the outlet of each basin (simple calibration), were re-...

This paper reviews the sources of uncertainty in physical climate impact assessments. It draws on examples from related fields such as climate modelling and numerical weather prediction in discussing how to interpret the results of multi-model ensembles and the role of model evaluation. Using large-scale, multi-model simulations of hydrological ext...

It is common knowledge that increasing CO 2 concentration plays a major role in enhancement of the greenhouse effect and contributes to global warming. The purpose of this study is to complement the conventional and established theory, that increased CO 2 concentration due to human emissions causes an increase in temperature, by considering the rev...

It is common knowledge that increasing CO 2 concentration plays a major role in enhancement of the greenhouse effect and contributes to global warming. The purpose of this study is to complement the conventional and established theory that increased CO 2 concentration due to human emissions causes an increase of temperature, by considering the reve...

It is common knowledge that increasing CO₂ concentration plays a major role in enhancement of the greenhouse effect and contributes to global warming. The purpose of this study is to complement the conventional and established theory that increased CO₂ concentration due to human emissions causes an increase of temperature, by considering the revers...

This file contains the submission letter, the rejection letter and the review comments. It was uploaded here by the authors with a notification to the editor, and through him to reviewers, that it is made public and that the authors would be happy to make a dialogue publicly.

This manuscript was submitted to “Science of the Total Environment” on 16 July 2020 and was rejected on 25 August 2020. Submission and rejection correspondence are archived here as supplements. Interestingly, the two reviewers rejected the paper on the opposite grounds, related to Granger causality, which however is not used in the paper, except fr...

While global warming has been evolving over several decades, in particular years there have been considerable deviations of global temperature from the underlying trend. These could be explained by climate variability patterns and, in particular, by the major interplays of atmospheric and oceanic processes that generate variations in the global cli...

Abstract Droughts are major, large‐scale, weather‐driven natural disasters, on the rise in the changing climate. We project changing population exposure to drought in two vulnerable, adjacent, basins of large rivers, the Tarim River Basin (TRB) and the Indus River Basin (IRB), for the future horizon 2021–2065. Drought events are assessed based on t...

Evidence shows that soil moisture (SM) anomalies (deficits or excesses) are the key factor affecting crop yield in rain-fed agriculture. Over last decades, Poland has faced several major droughts and at least one major soil moisture excess event leading to severe crop losses. This study aims to simulate the multi-annual variability of SM anomalies...

Droughts reflect the extent of water deficit on the land surface, and can be quantified by various indices. In current study, potential evapotranspiration (PET), which is one of factors that have great influence on the drought condition, is estimated by a set of models. The set consists of four temperature-decisive models (Hamon, Hargreaves-Samani,...

In the warming climate, flood risk is likely to increase over much of the globe. We present projections of changes of flood losses in China for a range of global warming scenarios, from 1.5° to 4.0°C above the preindustrial temperature, with a 0.5°C step. Projections of flood losses in China are based on river runoff simulations by a distributed hy...

Recent studies argue that the scientific communication of climate change overly emphasizes climate extremes. This, in turn, leads to a universal "atmosfear" as an association of anthropogenic climate change with frightening future scenarios. We analyze the factors driving such kinds of atmosfear, concerning the particular cases of hot extremes (hea...

The increase in surface air temperature in China has been faster than the global rate, and more high temperature spells are expected to occur in future. Here we assess the annual heat-related mortality in densely populated cities of China at 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C global warming. For this, the urban population is projected under five SSPs, and 31 GCM ru...

The present paper examines flood risk (composed of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) in a range of spatial perspectives – from the global to the local scale. It deals with observed records, noting that flood damage has been increasing. It also tackles projections for the future, related to flood hazard and flood losses. There are multiple factor...

The aim of this study was to estimate a likely number of additional fatalities in ten largest cities in Poland, recorded during heat waves in particularly hot summer seasons. In the period of 1989–2012, for which data on mortality were available, the most intense, long-lasting, summer heat waves occurred in 1992, 1994, 2006, and 2010. The numbers o...

Despite massive flood protection efforts in China, undertaken since the ancient times, disastrous floods continue to plague the country. In this paper, we discuss changes in flood hazard and flood risk in China. First, we review published results (including our own works) on change detection in observed records of intense precipitation, high river...

Most impact studies using downscaled climate data as input assume that the selection of few global climate models (GCMs) representing the largest spread covers the likely range of future changes. This study shows that including more GCMs can result in a very different behavior. We tested the influence of selecting various subsets of GCMs on the cli...

Despite ubiquitous warming, the lower Oder River typically freezes over almost every year. Ice jams may occur during freeze-up and ice cover breakup phases, particularly in the middle and lower reaches of the river, with weirs and piers. The slush ice and ice blocks may accumulate to form ice jams, leading to backwater effects and substantial water...

Several episodes of extreme precipitation excess and extreme precipitation deficit, with considerable economic and social impacts, have occurred in Europe and in Poland in the last decades. However, the changes of related indices exhibit complex variability. This paper analyses changes in indices related to observed abundance and deficit of precipi...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. Fig. 3b was incorrect. The correct version of Fig. 3b is given below.

This paper examines observed changes in the indices of mean precipitation in Poland, based on daily precipitation records for 45 stations in Poland from 1961 to 2017. Changes in annual, semi-annual, seasonal, as well as monthly precipitation totals are examined. In addition, changes in the number of days with precipitation (≥ 1 mm), as well as in t...

In recent years, the climate in the arid region of Northwest China has become warmer and wetter; however, glaciers in the north slope of the West Kunlun Mountains (NSWKM) show no obvious recession, and river flow is decreasing or stable. This contrasts with the prevalent response of glaciers to climate change, which is recession and initial increas...

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake: The spelling of the Joanna O’Keeffe’ name was incorrect. The correct spelling is Joanna O’Keeffe. © 2018, Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences & Polish Academy of Sciences.

The present paper examines flood risk (composed of hazard, exposure and vulnerability) in a range of spatial perspectives – from the global to the local scale. It deals with observed records, noting that flood damage has been increasing. It also tackles projections for the future, related to flood hazard and flood losses. There are multiple factors...

Flooding is the most common of all natural disasters and accounts for large numbers of casualties and a high amount of economic damage worldwide. To be ‘flood resilient’, countries should have sufficient capacity to resist, the capacity to absorb and recover, and the capacity to transform and adapt. Based on international comparative research, we c...

The present paper offers a brief assessment of climate change and associated impact in Poland, based on selected results of the Polish–Norwegian CHASE-PL project. Impacts are examined in selected sectors, such as water resources, natural hazard risk reduction, environment, agriculture and health. Results of change detection in long time series of o...

Significance We project drought losses in China under global warming of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C. To assess future drought losses, we project the regional gross domestic product under shared socioeconomic pathways instead of using a static socioeconomic scenario. We identify increasing precipitation and evapotranspiration patterns. With increasing drought...

Snow depth plays an essential role in the water and energy balance of the land surface. It is of special importance in arid and semi-arid regions of Central Asia. Owing to the limited availability of field observations, the spatial and temporal variations of snow depth are still poorly known. Using the Japanese 55-year (JRA-55) and the ERA-Interim...

There has been increasing scientific evidence related to climate change and its attribution, impacts, and possibilities of mitigation. Yet, climate contrarianism still persists. This paper concentrates on Poland and Norway—two fossil fuel giants that represent essential differences on climate contrarianism. In Norway there is a broad social and pol...

This is an invited essay by the Dooge Medalist of the 2017 International Hydrological Prize. The paper reflects a broader perspective on hydrology, as a result of the author’s long experience. It is suggested that transgressing the traditional hydrological perspective, by increasing the scale of research as well as interdisciplinarization have been...

Two approaches can be distinguished in studies of climate change impacts on water resources when accounting for issues related to impact model performance: (1) using a multi-model ensemble disregarding model performance, and (2) using models after their evaluation and considering model performance. We discuss the implications of both approaches in...

The paper examines options for river flood risk reduction in the Upper Vistula Basin located partly in the Carpathian Mountains in Poland. Projections of high-flow indices for the periods 2021–2050 and 2071–2100 generally indicate small future increases, although the projected flow changes vary highly both across the study basin as well as among cl...

The issue of trend detection in long time series of river flow records is of vast theoretical interest and considerable practical relevance. Water management is based on the assumption of stationarity; hence, it is crucial to check whether taking this assumption is justified. The objective of this study is to analyse long-term trends in selected ri...

Poland is the largest hard coal producer in the European Union (EU), and remains very dependent on coal for its energy. Despite the significant long-term implications of EU mitigation policies for the Polish economy, coverage of climate change and policy in the Polish media remains very low. This study of the coverage both in print media and on tel...

The CHASE-PL (Climate change impact assessment for selected sectors in Poland) Climate Projections – Gridded Daily Precipitation and Temperature dataset 5 km (CPLCP-GDPT5) consists of projected daily minimum and maximum air temperatures and precipitation totals of nine EURO-CORDEX regional climate model outputs bias corrected and downscaled to a 5...

This contribution discusses the challenges for developing national climate services in two countries with high fossil fuel production - Poland (coal) and Norway (oil and gas). Both countries, Poland and Norway, have highly developed weather services, but largely differ on climate services. Since empirical and dynamical downscaling of climate models...