the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 12 Nov 2025
Invited perspectives: Towards usable compound event research
Abstract. Supporting stakeholders with science-based decision-making to mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts is a central mandate of the climate research community. In particular, mapping out scenario-dependent climate risk landscapes is one of the most pressing challenges. Increasingly, communities and regions are experiencing high-impact climate and weather extremes that arise from a complex interplay of processes and events acting across various spatial and temporal scales. To account for these emerging trends, there is a growing recognition that both climate impact and early warning research needs to incorporate risks from compound events to better inform climate adaptation and mitigation efforts. This demand for more fine-grained and applicable knowledge gives rise to new data and modeling needs, and can increase uncertainties. Consequently, new methodological approaches and effective communication strategies are required for making research usable outside scientific communities. In this perspective, we reflect on this usability challenge by discussing impact data products, early warning and modeling capabilities, and communication tools, urging climate impact scientists to increasingly incorporate usability considerations in their research to meet the pressing demand for usable compound event research.
Competing interests: Some authors are members of the editorial board of the journal NHESS.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.- Preprint
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Status: open (until 24 Dec 2025)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4683', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Nov 2025 reply
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-4683', David N. Bresch, 02 Dec 2025
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The perspective is very well written. It provides a comprehensive overview, followed by a structured account of the way forward.
I do not see a need for revision, only two truly minor suggestions:
Iine 196ff, you might consider to cite also: Themessl, M., Enigl, K., Reisenhofer, S., Köberl, J., Kortschak, D., Reichel, S., Ostermann, M., Kienberger, S., Tiede, D., Bresch, D. N., Röösli, T., Lehner, D., Schubert, C., Pichler, A., Leitner M., and Balas, M., 2022: Collection, Standardization and Attribution of Robust Disaster Event Information – A Demonstrator of a National Event-Based Loss and Damage Database in Austria. Geosciences, 12/8, 283. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/12/8/283
And on a more general level, the following two papers outlines a conceptual approach that could easily be extended to multiple hazard and compound perspectives: Kam, P. M., Ciccone, F., Kropf, C. M., Riedel, L., Fairless , C., and Bresch D. N., 2024: Impact-based forecasting of tropical cyclone-related human displacement to support anticipatory action. Nature Communications, 15:8795 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53200-w; and Stalhandske, Z., Steinmann, C.B., Meiler, S., Sauer, I., Vogt, T., Bresch, D. N., and Kropf, C. M., 2024: Global multi-hazard risk assessment in a changing climate. Sci. Rep. 14, 5875. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55775-2
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4683-RC2
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This perspective aims to advance the visibility of research on compound (extreme) events, and assess its usability along four dimensions: impact data, prediction and early warning, modelling and projection, and addressing uncertainty. The paper has a very long author list, and possibly suffers from that as it certainly has the feeling of being written by a committee. On the other hand, it is a state-of-the-art summary and there is not much in there to disagree with. Perhaps ironically, the ways forward (the italic text in section 5) are all quite idealistic so I’m not convinced they are themselves “usable”. So I think the paper is perhaps skirting the really hard questions. Nevertheless, for someone new to the field, this will be a useful reference.
Minor comments:
Line 93: I am confused by “Sobel & Cohen (Coen and Sobel 2022)”. It should just be “Coen and Sobel (2022)”.
Line 96: I don’t think that Sobel (2021) argues against blue-sky fundamental research, only that we have long had enough knowledge to justify mitigation, so if one is interested in usability, it is better to focus on adaptation than on the drivers of climate change.
Lines 99-101: That seems over-stated. You seem to be suggesting that we cannot act without perfect information. There is so much uncertainty in the human dimension that even rather uncertain climate information can be useful. It all depends on the decision context.
Lines 462-468: This text concerning CMIP-class models seems extremely glib when it comes to compound extremes, especially for anything involving heavy precipitation (many papers by Kendon, Fowler, Prein, etc.). And don’t most CMIP-class models still struggle to simulate persistent flow anomalies?
Lines 602-603: Why do you say “non-deterministic”? After all, the title of Lorenz (1963) is “Deterministic nonperiodic flow”. Chaos can be deterministic, and the Navier-Stokes equations are deterministic. (Not that it matters: I would suggest simply deleting “non-deterministic” since it is beside the point.)
Line 615: Why deterministic? Wouldn’t a probabilistic prediction be acceptable, if it was available?