Extreme weather and climate events and their impacts can occur in complex combinations, an interaction shaped by physical drivers and societal forces. In these situations, governance, markets and other decision-making structures—together with population exposure and vulnerability—create nonphysical interconnections among events by linking their impacts, to positive or negative effect. Various anthropogenic actions can also directly affect the severity of events, further complicating these feedback loops. Such relationships are rarely characterized or considered in physical-sciences-based research contexts. Here, we present a multidisciplinary argument for the concept of connected extreme events, and we suggest vantage points and approaches for producing climate information useful in guiding decisions about them.

Persistent heat extremes can have severe impacts on ecosystems and societies, including excess mortality, wildfires, and harvest failures. Here we identify Europe as a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes over the past 42 years. This accelerated trend is linked to atmospheric dynamical changes via an increase in the frequency and persistence of double jet stream states over Eurasia. We find that double jet occurrences are particularly important for western European heatwaves, explaining up to 35% of temperature variability. The upward trend in the persistence of double jet events explains almost all of the accelerated heatwave trend in western Europe, and about 30% of it over the extended European region. Those findings provide evidence that in addition to thermodynamical drivers, atmospheric dynamical changes have contributed to the increased rate of European heatwaves, with implications for risk management and potential adaptation strategies.

The summer of 2018 witnessed a number of extreme weather events such as heatwaves in North America, Western Europe and the Caspian Sea region, and rainfall extremes in South-East Europe and Japan that occurred near-simultaneously. Here we show that some of these extremes were connected by an amplified hemisphere-wide wavenumber 7 circulation pattern. We show that this pattern constitutes an important teleconnection in Northern Hemisphere summer associated with prolonged and above-normal temperatures in North America, Western Europe and the Caspian Sea region. This pattern was also observed during the European heatwaves of 2003, 2006 and 2015 among others. We show that the occurrence of this wave 7 pattern has increased over recent decades.

Persistent episodes of extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere summer have been shown to be associated with the presence of high-amplitude quasi-stationary atmospheric Rossby waves within a particular wavelength range (zonal wavenumber 6–8). The underlying mechanistic relationship involves the phenomenon of quasi-resonant amplification (QRA) of synoptic-scale waves with that wavenumber range becoming trapped within an effective mid-latitude atmospheric waveguide. Recent work suggests an increase in recent decades in the occurrence of QRA-favorable conditions and associated extreme weather, possibly linked to amplified Arctic warming and thus a climate change influence. Here, we isolate a specific fingerprint in the zonal mean surface temperature profile that is associated with QRA-favorable conditions. State-of-the-art (“CMIP5”) historical climate model simulations subject to anthropogenic forcing display an increase in the projection of this fingerprint that is mirrored in multiple observational surface temperature datasets. Both the models and observations suggest this signal has only recently emerged from the background noise of natural variability.