Climate and Weather Extremes (Third Edition)

Dear Colleagues,

Extreme weather and climate events are becoming increasingly frequent and intense worldwide, producing major impacts on human societies and natural systems. In recent years, the planet has faced a growing number of catastrophic events—including severe storms, droughts, floods, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, and wildfires—that have caused substantial loss of life, widespread destruction, and escalating economic damages across all continents.

Global assessments indicate that 2025 saw 55 weather disasters with damages exceeding one billion dollars worldwide, reflecting the persistent severity of climate‑related hazards at the planetary scale. In the preceding year, global losses from weather disasters reached approximately $277 billion, with a large share driven by extreme storms, floods, and wildfires. Looking ahead, global insured losses from extreme weather and climate‑related disasters are expected to continue their long‑term rise, which suggests that losses will likely escalate substantially in the near future as climate‑change‑driven hazards intensify across multiple regions. These trends highlight not only a rising global exposure to extreme events but also the increasing vulnerability of populations, ecosystems, and infrastructure in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

Understanding the behavior, drivers, and evolution of weather and climate extremes is therefore essential for assessing how fast and how profoundly global climate regimes are shifting and for informing effective adaptation, mitigation, and risk‑reduction strategies at local, regional, and global scales.

This Special Issue focuses on extreme events occurring in both tails of the historical distribution of climate variables—including exceptionally high or low values of precipitation, temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, solar radiation, and others. We welcome contributions addressing all dimensions of extreme climate behavior, including the following:

• Observation, detection, and monitoring of extreme events;
• Physical processes governing their onset, intensification, and dissipation;
• Internal climate mechanisms and external drivers, including human‑induced climate change;
• Space–time patterns, natural variability, and forced changes at multiple scales;
• Present and future regimes of extremes (frequency, duration, periodicity, severity), including trend analyses and projections;
• Interactions among extreme events, compound extremes, and associated natural hazards (e.g., floods, landslides, wildfires);
• Hazard characterization, risk assessment, and vulnerability analyses;
• Numerical modeling, simulation, and event attribution;
• Impacts of extreme events on human systems, ecological communities, and built environments.

We encourage submissions of review papers, database descriptions, methodological developments, empirical analyses, case studies, and modeling and future projection studies, all aimed at advancing our global understanding of weather and climate extremes.

Dr. Mário Gonzalez Pereira
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Climate is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• weather extremes
• climate extremes
• heat waves
• cold waves
• drought
• heavy precipitation
• wind gusts
• storms
• hailstorm
• downburst

• Climate and Weather Extremes in Climate (10 articles)
• Climate and Weather Extremes: Volume II in Climate (11 articles)