A New Framework for Identifying and Investigating Seasonal Climate Extremes

Previous studies have recognized the societal relevance of climatic extremes on the seasonal time scale and examined physical processes leading to individual high-impact extreme seasons (e.g., extremely wet or warm seasons). However, these findings have not yet been generalized beyond case studies since at any specific location only very few seasonal events of such rarity occurred in the observational record. In this concept paper, a pragmatic approach to pool seasonal extremes across space is developed and applied to investigate hot summers and cold winters in ERA-Interim and the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESM-LENS). We identify spatial extreme season objects as contiguous regions of extreme seasonal mean temperatures based on statistical modeling. Regional pooling of extreme season objects in CESM-LENS then yields considerable samples of analogs to even the most extreme ERA-Interim events. This approach offers numerous opportunities for systematically analyzing large samples of extreme seasons, and several such analyses are illustrated. We reveal a striking co-occurrence of El Nino to La Nina transitions and the largest ERA-Interim midlatitude extreme summer events. Moreover, we perform a climate model evaluation with regard to extreme season size and intensity measures and estimate how often an extreme winter like the cold North American 2013/14 winter is expected anywhere in midlatitude regions. Furthermore, we present a large set of simulated analogs to this event, which makes it possible to study commonalities and differences of their underlying physical processes. Finally, substantial but spatially varying climatological differences in the size of extreme summer and extreme winter objects are identified.