New ESD Letter: Climatology and trends of concurrent temperature extremes in the global extratropics

12 September 2024

Simultaneous heatwaves or cold spells in remote geographical regions have potentially far-reaching impacts on society and the environment. Despite this, we have little knowledge of when and where these extreme events have occurred in the past decades. In this paper, the authors present a summary of past simultaneous heatwaves or cold spells and provide a computer program to enable other researchers to study them.

Chief editor's statement: Concurrent temperature extremes are becoming common but there is no climatology of such extremes in the literature. This study provides a climatology for concurrent heatwaves and cold spells and a programming toolbox to study such phenomena. This dataset and toolbox will be of interest to a wide readership, expecially those interested in climate and climate change science.

Contact: Gabriele Messori (gabriele.messori@geo.uu.se)