From the Americas to Africa, 2024 was marked by extreme weather events. Research indicates that these incidents, intensified by climate change, call for better forecasting and a robust response system to save lives and reduce impact.
From prolonged droughts in southern Africa and Central America early in the year to catastrophic rainfall in Spain and the deadly Hurricane Helene along the U.S. East Coast, 2024 has been a year of extreme weather events that have impacted billions worldwide.
The Science Behind the Storms
A recent study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, led by Dr. Wenxia Zhang of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, examines the most significant climate events of 2024, including severe rainfall, flooding, tropical cyclones, and droughts. The study explores their underlying causes, the influence of global warming, and the urgent need for societies to become more “climate-resilient.” Since 2022, Dr. Zhang’s team has conducted annual reviews of global climate extremes, identifying 2024 as a year particularly defined by extraordinary 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.
The Role of El Niño and Climate Change
In particular, many of the extreme rainfall and drought events of 2024 were related to the atmospheric configurations associated with the El Niño in winter 2023/24. However, ENSO does not fully explain individual events. Layered on top of that, according to studies of extreme event attribution, or “attribution science,” we know that human-induced climate change since the pre-industrial era has in many cases exacerbated extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones, and droughts, and therefore their associated socioeconomic impacts.
“The climate change influence can be direct through physical processes causing the extreme, or indirect in influencing the weather, large scale drivers, and key baselines,” adds Dr. Risbey.
“This is consistent with basic physical understanding that anthropogenic warming leads to increases in atmospheric moisture and evaporative demand, and hence, potentially enhances extreme rainfall and droughts, respectively,” explains Dr. Wenxia Zhang.
The Challenge of Accurate Attribution
Despite our understanding of why the world is experiencing increasingly strong and frequent extreme climate events, the research team behind this study makes it clear that key challenges remain in our knowledge and attribution of these phenomena—not least the often-seen inconsistencies between observed and modeled extremes (especially for extreme rainfall), which limits our confidence in attribution results.
“Improved extreme event attribution requires a better understanding of climate change,” says Dr. Micheal Brody of George Mason University (USA) and the International Agricultural University (Uzbekistan), another of the paper’s authors. “More accurate attribution of extreme events is expected to inform decision-making, ranging from post-disaster recovery to future preparedness.”
Forecasting and Response to Extreme Events
Another crucial angle to this annually developing story of our climate is our ability to accurately forecast and broadcast the occurrence of extreme events, and then to act appropriately. Doing so could save many of the lives of the people who otherwise fall victim to floods and hurricanes like those seen in 2024.
“Some of the extreme events witnessed in 2024, such as Hurricane Helene, were well forecasted,” notes Dr. Zhuo Wang from the University of Illinois, another member of the team. “The destructive impacts were partly due to the vulnerability of the underprepared community to a changing climate.”
Dr. Piotr Wolski, University of Cape Town, adds: “Increasing the quality of forecasts is important, but to reduce the impacts of extreme events, it is more important to achieve proper dissemination of warnings and to act upon them to lessen existing vulnerabilities.”
Building Climate Resilience
Dr. Wolski’s comments refer to the idea of being “climate-resilient,” which is fast becoming a crucial aspect in our holistic approach to climate change and the effects it is having on our society. As we shift to a feeling of almost inevitability that this is our world now, there is a rising sense of what can be done to protect ourselves alongside how to prevent the problem in the first place.
The Human Impact and Urgency for Action
As we saw in Valencia, Spain, following the devastating floods and mudslides there in October, it does not take much for the impacts of extreme climate events to manifest as frustration and anger among the people affected.
Clearly, it is more urgent than ever to not only work towards better understanding the drivers of extreme weather and climate, but also to better predict their occurrence and develop effective systems to rapidly act upon the information at hand.
Only then can we be better prepared for years like 2024.
Reference: “A Year Marked by Extreme Precipitation and Floods: Weather and Climate Extremes in 2024” by Wenxia Zhang, Tianjun Zhou, Wanheng Ye, Tingyu Zhang, Lixia Zhang, Piotr Wolski, James Risbey, Zhuo Wang, Seung-Ki Min, Hamish Ramsay, Michael Brody, Alice Grimm, Robin Clark, Kangnian Ren, Jie Jiang, Xiaolong Chen, Shenming Fu, Lan Li, Shijie Tang and Shuai Hu, 11 January 2025, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
DOI: 10.1007/s00376-025-4540-4
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2 Comments
“From the Americas to Africa, 2024 was marked by extreme weather events. Research indicates that these incidents, intensified by climate change, …”
Not everyone agrees that 2024 was exceptional or that anthropogenic climate change was responsible for the alleged extremes.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/01/13/bbc-try-to-wriggle-out-of-extreme-weather-claims/#more-85282
https://climaterealism.com/2025/01/carbon-brief-and-the-guardian-falsely-claim-climate-change-is-making-cyclones-worse/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/08/northern-hemisphere-hurricane-intensity-significantly-declines-in-2024-despite-climate-alarmists-egregiously-wrong-hype-otherwise/
One should ask themselves why the public is exposed consistently to alarmist claims like this article when there is no shortage of evidence countering the claims. An ‘honest broker’ would acknowledge that there are two sides to the story, and present both, rather than providing a ‘half-truth.’
Even today not everyone agrees that the earth is spherical. So, it’s not?
Not everyone agrees that genocide of Jews happened under the Nazi regime. So everything was kosher there?
Not everyone has to agree. Most reasonable ones have to agree. Unreasonable people and people with vested interests will never agree. Those who disagree with climate change publish their own bullsh*t here and there, not daring to face the scrunity of actual climate scientists by publishing in major peer reviewed journals. And additionally climate change is becoming quite obvious to even lay people (reasonable ones, mind) with evidence like receding glaciers.
Climate change is no longer a story with two sides, just like the world isn’t somewhat spherical and somewhat flat. We should be alarmed at the damage done at global scale. What should also be the alarmist story is the existence of people like you, who are willing to sacrifice the security of millions for their narrow individual reasons.