S20 South Africa

From the persistent droughts of southern Africa and Central America in the early part of the year to the more recent devastating extreme rainfall in Spain and the deadly Hurricane Helene along America’s east coast, 2024 has been a year of climate events that affected the lives of billions of people.

In a recent paper published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences , an international team of scientists led by Dr Wenxia Zhang at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, provide an overview of the characteristics and impacts of the most notable extreme events of the year, including rainfall and flooding, tropical cyclones, and droughts. Moreover, they discuss their causes, the role of global warming, and the challenges we face in the future to be “climate-resilient”. Dr Zhang and her team have been conducting an annual review of the global climate extremes since 2022, and this year they found it to be marked by exceptional rainfall and flooding.

“Most extreme events have a large random element in that they are subject to fluctuations in the weather, and occur when weather patterns set up in just the ‘right’ way. Some extremes are more likely when larger-scale drivers such as ENSO influence the weather patterns in a region,” says Dr James Risbey at CSIRO, coauthor of the study.