EMBRACE-AGS-Growth: Compounding Extremes--Trends in, Links among, and Impacts of Marine Heatwaves, Human Heat Stress, and Heavy Precipitation in the Southeast United States

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As global temperatures have risen, extreme heat and rainfall events have increased in frequency and intensity in warm humid climates such as the Southeast U.S. These extremes are manifested in anomalous ocean heat events that can devastate ecosystems (marine heat waves [MHWs]), humid heat stress over land, and heavy precipitation. While each of these extremes has been studied individually, this project will be the first to investigate their compound co-occurrences, trends, and links in the Southeast U.S. Furthermore, by incorporating census-derived metrics of human vulnerability, this research will identify the sub-regions and metropolitan areas within the Southeast U.S. that are most affected by the three compound extremes, which often exact their greatest toll on vulnerable populations. To communicate key results to relevant stakeholders and the public, monthly professional-quality broadcast videos will be produced and disseminated through social media and web platforms. The broadcasts will be led by STEM students and professionals at the host institution, creating a cohort of young researchers responsible for undertaking climate change research and communicating it to diverse audiences on a regular basis. Despite occurring on different timescales, MHWs, humid heat stress, and heavy precipitation events have all increased in intensity and frequency, especially in humid subtropical climates such as the Southeast U.S. This project will first establish a climatology and trend analysis of MHWs in waters adjacent to the Southeast U.S. Next, using wet bulb globe temperature and high-resolution reanalysis data, work will elucidate the frequencies and trends in humid heat stress extremes over land areas adjacent to MHWs. The third project phase will examine the compound occurrences and causal mechanisms among the three extreme event types over the past few decades. This analysis will increase understanding of the frequency and trends in the compound extremes, as well as the physical mechanisms that connect them. Finally, social vulnerability data will be integrated into the compound extremes dataset to produce a gridded compound extremes vulnerability index for the Southeast U.S. This index will be able to identify areas that are not only experiencing more frequent and severe compound extremes, but also contain large numbers of socioeconomically vulnerable persons, poor drainage, and lack access to cooling, all of which can result in even greater human impacts from compound hazards.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.