A new framework for identifying and investigating seasonal climate extremes

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.