More than Magnitude: Towards a multidimensional understanding of unprecedented weather to better support disaster management

Abstract

The 1900 Galveston Texas Hurricane, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, and the 2023 Tropical Cyclone Freddy were all events that were unprecedented in diverse ways and had severe humanitarian impacts. Understanding past and future risk of unprecedented weather is an emerging question across climate science disciplines but use of this research by the humanitarian sector has been limited. This cross-disciplinary paper is an effort by climate scientists and humanitarian practitioners to address this gap. For it, we combined narrative and scoping literature reviews with structured practitioner engagement to develop a working definition and typology of unprecedented weather through a disaster management lens. We qualitatively coded over 400 peer-reviewed articles to highlight the current state of research on unprecedented weather, and then discussed these findings in a workshop with 48 humanitarian practitioners. Our results show that, while analyses of past and future unprecedented weather often focus on the magnitude of such events, extreme weather can be unprecedented in many other dimensions, all which have significant implications for early warning, anticipatory action, and disaster response planning. We conclude with a call for more imagination and diversity in research on extreme weather risks, and for closer collaboration between climate scientists and disaster managers to design and answer questions that matter for humanitarian outcomes.