Warming increased bark beetle-induced tree mortality by 30% during an extreme drought in California.

Quantifying the responses of forest disturbances to climate warming is critical to our understanding of carbon cycles and energy balances of the Earth system. The impact of warming on bark beetle outbreaks is complex as multiple drivers of these events may respond differently to warming. Using a novel model of bark beetle biology and host tree interactions, we assessed how contemporary warming affected western pine beetle (Dendroctonus brevicomis) populations and mortality of its host, ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), during an extreme drought in the Sierra Nevada, California, United States. When compared with the field data, our model captured the western pine beetle flight timing and rates of ponderosa pine mortality observed during the drought. In assessing the influence of temperature on western pine beetles, we found that contemporary warming increased the development rate of the western pine beetle and decreased the overwinter mortality rate of western pine beetle larvae leading to increased population growth during periods of lowered tree defense. We attribute a 29.9% (95% CI: 29.4%-30.2%) increase in ponderosa pine mortality during drought directly to increases in western pine beetle voltinism (i.e., associated with increased development rates of western pine beetle) and, to a much lesser extent, reductions in overwintering mortality. These findings, along with other studies, suggest each degree (°C) increase in temperature may have increased the number of ponderosa pine killed by upwards of 35%-40% °C-1 if the effects of compromised tree defenses (15%-20%) and increased western pine beetle populations (20%) are additive. Due to the warming ability to considerably increase mortality through the mechanism of bark beetle populations, models need to consider climate's influence on both host tree stress and the bark beetle population dynamics when determining future levels of tree mortality.

Anthropogenic influence on extreme precipitation over global land areas seen in multiple observational datasets.

The intensification of extreme precipitation under anthropogenic forcing is robustly projected by global climate models, but highly challenging to detect in the observational record. Large internal variability distorts this anthropogenic signal. Models produce diverse magnitudes of precipitation response to anthropogenic forcing, largely due to differing schemes for parameterizing subgrid-scale processes. Meanwhile, multiple global observational datasets of daily precipitation exist, developed using varying techniques and inhomogeneously sampled data in space and time. Previous attempts to detect human influence on extreme precipitation have not incorporated model uncertainty, and have been limited to specific regions and observational datasets. Using machine learning methods that can account for these uncertainties and capable of identifying the time evolution of the spatial patterns, we find a physically interpretable anthropogenic signal that is detectable in all global observational datasets. Machine learning efficiently generates multiple lines of evidence supporting detection of an anthropogenic signal in global extreme precipitation.

Event-to-event intensification of the hydrologic cycle from 1.5 °C to a 2 °C warmer world.

The Paris agreement was adopted to hold the global average temperature increase to well below 2 °C and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 °C. Here, we investigate the event-to-event hydroclimatic intensity, where an event is a pair of adjacent wet and dry spells, under future warming scenarios. According to a set of targeted multi-model large ensemble experiments, event-wise intensification will significantly increase globally for an additional 0.5 °C warming beyond 1.5 °C. In high latitudinal regions of the North American continent and Eurasia, this intensification is likely to involve overwhelming increases in wet spell intensity. Western and Eastern North America will likely experience more intense wet spells with negligible changes of dry spells. For the Mediterranean region, enhancement of dry spells seems to be dominating compared to the decrease in wet spell strength, and this will lead to an overall event-wise intensification. Furthermore, the extreme intensification could be 10 times stronger than the mean intensification. The high damage potential of such drastic changes between flood and drought conditions poses a major challenge to adaptation, and the findings suggest that risks could be substantially reduced by achieving a 1.5 °C target.