Global impacts of hydrological and climatic extremes on vegetation

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credits: NOAA

Climate models predict an aggravation of droughts, extreme precipitation events and heatwaves as we progress into the future.

However, the recent Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) AR5-report remains inconclusive on this matter, revealing large discrepancies in the model projections of these extremes. These uncertainties obstruct the adequate long-term management and societal adaptation.

Recent advances in satellite Earth observation – with the development of consistent global historical records of crucial environmental and climatic variables – provide new means to start unravelling the processes driving long-term changes in climate extremes, and understanding the impact of these changes on terrestrial ecosystems. In addition, these datasets offer an observational benchmark to evaluate the skill of climate models at representing climatic extremes and vegetation dynamics.

SAT–EX raises with the goals of revealing how droughts, heatwaves and extreme rain events have changed in frequency and intensity over the past three decades, to uncover the causes behind these changes and the consequences for terrestrial vegetation. The ability of our current IPCC climate models to estimate these processes will be evaluated by comparison to novel satellite-based data records.

In the long run, SAT–EX findings will advance towards the timely forecasting of climate extremes, provide valuable insights about the management of water resources during extreme events, help characterize global terrestrial carbon budgets, and reduce the uncertainty in long-term model predictions of climate extremes and global vegetation dynamics.

More detailed information about the project here: SAT-EX Technical Summary.