RESUMEN
This is an extended editors' commentary on the topical collection "Historical and recent change in extreme climate over East Asia", which collects a total of 15 papers related to the change and variability of extreme climate events in East Asia over the last few hundreds years. The extreme climate events are broadly classified into three categories: temperature and extreme warmth/coldness, precipitation and floods/droughts and western North Pacific typhoons. This commentary briefly summarizes the main findings presented in each paper in this topical collection, and outlines the implications of these findings for monitoring, detecting and modeling of regional climate change and for studying climate change impacts and adaptability. It also assesses the uncertainties of these studies, as well as the remaining knowledge gaps that should be filled in the future. One solid conclusion we can draw from these studies is that there was a marked decadal to multi-decadal variability of extreme climate events in East Asia in recent history, and the extreme events as observed during the last decades of the instrumental era were still within the range of natural variability except for some of those related to temperature. More severe and enduring droughts occurred in the early 20 th century or the earlier periods of history, frequently leading to great famines in northern China. Uncertainties remain in reconstructing historical extreme climate events and analyzing the early instrumental records. Further research could focus on the improvement of methodology in proxy based reconstruction of multi-decadal variations of surface air temperature and precipitation/drought, the recovery, digitization, calibration and verification of the early instrumental records, and the mechanisms of the observed multi-decadal variability of extreme climate in the region.
RESUMEN
China experienced significant flooding in the summer of 2020 and multiple extreme cold surges during the winter of 2020/21. Additionally, the 2020 typhoon season had below average activity with especially quiet activity during the first half of the season in the western North Pacific (WNP). Sea surface temperature changes in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans all contributed to the heavy rainfall in China, but the Atlantic and Indian Oceans seem to have played dominant roles. Enhancement and movement of the Siberian High caused a wavier pattern in the jet stream that allowed cold polar air to reach southward, inducing cold surges in China. Large vertical wind shear and low humidity in the WNP were responsible for fewer typhoons in the first half of the typhoon season. Although it is known that global warming can increase the frequency of extreme weather and climate events, its influences on individual events still need to be quantified. Additionally, the extreme cold surge during 16-18 February 2021 in the United States shares similar mechanisms with the winter 2020/21 extreme cold surges in China.