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A recent study published in Nature Geoscience provides groundbreaking insights into long-term changes in tropical weather patterns that are leading to an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as heat waves and heavy rainfall in the Indo-Pacific. These changes are possibly driven by global warming, among other factors.

The paper, titled "Indo-Pacific regional extremes aggravated by changes in tropical weather patterns," employs a recently proposed methodology that characterizes occurrence trends of weather patterns using atmospheric analogs, which are linked to the concept of recurrences in dynamical systems theory.

Unlike previous approaches, which have often focused on shifts in average behavior, the method used in the study can identify occurrence trends for each daily weather pattern, thereby enabling a direct study of their association with extreme events—something that was previously unachievable.

Thanks to this methodology, it was possible to identify the emergence of new large-scale atmospheric patterns, which are exacerbating regional weather extremes.

The study, led by doctoral student Chenyu Dong and Assistant Professor Gianmarco Mengaldo from the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and a collaborative team of international scientists, uses advanced reanalysis datasets to analyze the tropical Indo-Pacific region's evolving weather systems.

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