MIT researchers are mapping extreme weather risks — and building tools to act on them
Warming temperatures are fueling more extreme weather-related events — catastrophic floods, severe hurricanes and cyclones, and wildfires exacerbated by drought.
Addressing that shortcoming was one of five research areas selected for MIT’s 2022 Climate Grand Challenges , an ambitious effort to accelerate science-based solutions to climate problems. The area, titled “ Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes ,” focuses on tools to help evaluate a location’s vulnerabilities to flooding, cyclones, humid heat waves, or other climate-related events.
Four years later, collaborations among more than 40 faculty and student researchers on Weather and Climate Extremes projects have yielded 29 published research papers and digital tools and datasets that are already in use or close to deployment. Individual projects cut across forecasting, risk assessment, on-the-ground planning, and resilient infrastructure.
“Communities across the United States and around the world are already confronting the consequences of extreme weather,” says Evelyn Wang, MIT’s vice president for energy and climate, whose office has been funding and supporting all of the Grand Challenges since 2024. “Through the Climate Grand Challenges, an interdisciplinary team at MIT is advancing the science, technologies, and practical strategies needed to help communities anticipate these risks and build greater resilience.”
Paul O’Gorman, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is refining the science behind forecasting extreme weather events, such as last year’s major flooding events in Central Texas and in Pakistan. “There have been a lot of unprecedented, record-breaking events,” he says, “and we want to understand how they are changing as the climate warms, and how they’re changing in different regions.”
One aspect that his group has been examining is the relationship between extreme rainfall events and a warming climate. Climate models predict that extreme rainfall increases less in summer than other seasons in much of the United States and Europe. O’Gorman’s team found that these seasonal shifts stem from not only how much water is in the atmosphere, which is measured by specific humidity, but also how close it is to saturation, which is measured by relative humidity. “We found that changes in relative humidity played a big role, which was something that hadn’t been appreciated before, and something we need to take into account,” he says.