Summary of a workshop on extreme weather events in a warming world organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Climate change is not only about changes in means of climatic variables such as temperature, precipitation and wind, but also their extreme values which are of critical importance to human society and ecosystems. To inspire the Swedish climate research community and to promote assessments of international research on past and future changes in extreme weather events against the global climate change background, the Earth Science Class of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences organized a workshop entitled ‘Extreme weather events in a warming world’ in 2019. This article summarizes and synthesizes the key points from the presentations and discussions of the workshop on changes in floods, droughts, heat waves, as well as on tropical cyclones and extratropical storms. In addition to reviewing past achievements in these research fields and identifying research gaps with a focus on Sweden, future challenges and opportunities for the Swedish climate research community are highlighted.

Keywords:

• climate change
• extreme weather events
• workshop
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Petter Lind at SMHI for contributing with Fig. 2. Elin Mellqvist and Aifang Chen made an important contribution to the organization of the workshop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This workshop was supported by Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Swedish Research Council Formas (2018-02858), Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, as well as Swedish strategic research programs MERGE and BECC.