Jana Sillmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 6569052 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jana Sillmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jana |
| FAMILY NAME | Sillmann |
| SIGNATURE | SILLMANN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | CICERO Center for International Climate Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0219-5345 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 17 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The future of hot and dry events in the breadbasket regions of maize
Heatwaves and dry spells can severely impact crop yields, making it crucial to understand the nature of these events to ensure food security in a changing climate. We use the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble to examine the occurrence of hot–dry extremes in key crop-producing regions known as ‘breadbasket regions’, either in single or multiple breadbasket regions simultaneously, focusing on the differences between 1.5 ∘ C and 2 ∘ C global warmi…
A global perspective on the spatial representation of climate extremes from km-scale models
Weather and climate extremes are rare manifestations of climate variability that can severely impact society and the environment. To investigate their properties and changes on a global scale, observational records are often complemented by climate models such as those from the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). However, typical CMIP6 models have a grid spacing of about 100 km and, therefore, do not allow the representation of …
Varieties of approaches to constructing physical climate storylines: A review
The physical climate storyline (PCS) approach is increasingly recognized by the physical climate research community as a tool to produce and communicate decision‐relevant climate risk information. While PCS is generally understood as a single concept, different varieties of the approach are applied according to the aims and purposes of the PCS and the scientists that build them. To unpack this diversity of detail, this article gives an overview o…
Human heat stress could offset potential economic benefits of CO2 fertilization in crop production under a high-emissions scenario
Climate change can significantly impact agriculture, leading to food security challenges. Most previous studies have investigated the direct climate impact on crops while neglecting the impact of heat stress on agricultural labor. Here, we assess the economic consequences of climate impacts on four major crops—maize, soybean, wheat, and rice—for scenarios involving low and high greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis is based on the output from a …
Linking regional economic impacts of temperature-related disasters to underlying climatic hazards
Temperature-induced disasters lead to major human and economic damage, but the relationship between their climatic drivers and impacts is difficult to quantify. In part, this is due to a lack of data with suitable resolution, scale and coverage on impacts and disaster occurrence. Here, we address this gap using new datasets on subnational sector-disaggregated economic productivity and geo-coded disaster locations to quantify the role of climatic …
A better integration of health and economic impact assessments of climate change
Climate change could lead to high economic burden for individuals (i.e. low income and high prices). While economic conditions are important determinants of climate change vulnerability, environmental epidemiological studies focus primarily on the direct impact of temperature on morbidity and mortality without accounting for climate-induced impacts on the economy. More integrated approaches are needed to provide comprehensive assessments of clima…
Earth system resilience and tipping behavior
Anthropogenic climate change, marked by unprecedented extremes, is an immediate concern. The Earth’s limited ability to adapt to abrupt changes within our societal timeframe has raised global alarm. Resilience, the capacity to withstand and recover from disturbances, diminishes as disturbances intensify. For avoiding potential catastrophic changes, it is crucial to identify tipping points, where a change in part of a system becomes self-perpetuat…
Ruminating on sustainable food systems in a net-zero world
Gaussian copula modeling of extreme cold and weak-wind events over Europe conditioned on winter weather regimes
A transition to renewable energy is needed to mitigate climate change. In Europe, this transition has been led by wind energy, which is one of the fastest growing energy sources. However, energy demand and production are sensitive to meteorological conditions and atmospheric variability at multiple time scales. To accomplish the required balance between these two variables, critical conditions of high demand and low wind energy supply must be con…
Increasing spatiotemporal proximity of heat and precipitation extremes in a warming world quantified by a large model ensemble
Increases in climate hazards and their impacts mark one of the major challenges of climate change. Situations in which hazards occur close enough to one another to result in amplified impacts, because systems are insufficiently resilient or because hazards themselves are made more severe, are of special concern. We consider projected changes in such compounding hazards using the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble under a moderate (RCP4.5) emissi…
Combined impacts of climate and air pollution on human health and agricultural productivity
Climate change and air pollution can interact to amplify risks to human health and crop production. This has significant implications for our ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g. SDGs 2, 3, 13, 15) and for the design of effective mitigation and adaptation policies and risk management. To be able to achieve the SDG targets, closer integration of climate change and air pollution both in terms of impact assessment for human healt…
Perspectives on tipping points in integrated models of the natural and human Earth system: Cascading effects and telecoupling
The Earth system and the human system are intrinsically linked. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to the climate crisis, which is causing unprecedented extreme events and could trigger Earth system tipping elements. Physical and social forces can lead to tipping points and cascading effects via feedbacks and telecoupling, but the current generation of climate-economy models do not generally take account of these interactions and fee…
Urbanization in megacities increases the frequency of extreme precipitation events far more than their intensity
More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas (UN Population Division 2018 The World's cities in 2018 (UN: New York)), which are especially vulnerable to climate extremes (Field et al 2012 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)). Urbanization itself is known to increase surface t…
Evaluation of CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulations of historical surface air temperature extremes using proper evaluation methods
Reliable projections of extremes by climate models are becoming increasingly important in the context of climate change and associated societal impacts. Extremes are by definition rare events, characterized by a small sample associated with large uncertainties. The evaluation of extreme events in model simulations thus requires performance measures that compare full distributions rather than simple summaries. This paper proposes the use of the in…
Economic costs of heat-induced reductions in worker productivity due to global warming
Facilitating Climate-Smart Investments
Intensification of summer precipitation with shorter time-scales in Europe
While daily extreme precipitation intensities increase with global warming on average at approximately the same rate as the availability of water vapor (∼7%/°C), a debated topic is whether sub-daily extremes increase more. Modelling at convection-permitting scales has been deemed necessary to reproduce extreme summer precipitation at local scale. Here we analyze multi-model ensembles and apply a 3 km horizontal resolution model over four regions …
Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will lower increases in inequalities of four hazard indicators of climate change
Clarifying characteristics of hazards and risks of climate change at 2 °C and 1.5 °C global warming is important for understanding the implications of the Paris Agreement. We perform and analyze large ensembles of 2 °C and 1.5 °C warming simulations. In the 2 °C runs, we find substantial increases in extreme hot days, heavy rainfalls, high streamflow and labor capacity reduction related to heat stress. For example, about half of the world’s popul…
Asking the right questions in adaptation research and practice: Seeing beyond climate impacts in rural Nepal
Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how …
Influence of blocking on Northern European and Western Russian heatwaves in large climate model ensembles
Better preparedness for summer heatwaves could mitigate their adverse effects on society. This can potentially be attained through an increased understanding of the relationship between heatwaves and one of their main dynamical drivers, atmospheric blocking. In the 1979-2015 period, we find that there is a significant correlation between summer heatwave magnitudes and the number of days influenced by atmospheric blocking in Northern Europe and We…
Synoptic and meteorological drivers of extreme ozone concentrations over Europe
The present work assesses the relationship between local and synoptic meteorological conditions and surface ozone concentration over Europe in spring and summer months, during the period 1998-2012 using a new interpolated data set of observed surface ozone concentrations over the European domain.Along with local meteorological conditions, the influence of large-scale atmospheric circulation on surface ozone is addressed through a set of airflow i…
When will unusual heat waves become normal in a warming Africa
Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. In the upcoming decades the occurrence of longer, hotter and more frequent heat waves could have a strong impact on human mortality and crop production. Here, by applying the heat wave magnitude index daily to temperature reanalysis data, we quantify the magnitude and the spatial extent of the most extreme heat waves experienced in Africa between 1979 and October 2015 across diffe…
Top ten European heatwaves since 1950 and their occurrence in the coming decades
The Russian heatwave in 2010 killed tens of thousands of people, and was by far the worst event in Europe since at least 1950, according to recent studies and a novel universal heatwave index capturing both the duration and magnitude of heatwaves. Here, by taking an improved version of this index, namely the heat wave magnitude index daily, we rank the top ten European heatwaves that occurred in the period 1950–2014, and show the spatial distribu…
Observed and simulated temperature extremes during the recent warming hiatus
The discrepancy between recent observed and simulated trends in global mean surface temperature has provoked a debate about possible causes and implications for future climate change projections. However, little has been said in this discussion about observed and simulated trends in global temperature extremes. Here we assess trend patterns in temperature extremes and evaluate the consistency between observed and simulated temperature extremes ov…
Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 2. Future climate projections
This study provides an overview of projected changes in climate extremes indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). The temperature‐ and precipitation‐based indices are computed with a consistent methodology for climate change simulations using different emission scenarios in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CMIP3) and Phase 5 (CMIP5) multimodel ensembles. We analyze changes in the indic…
Asking the right questions in adaptation research and practice: Seeing beyond climate impacts in rural Nepal
Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how …
Economic costs of heat-induced reductions in worker productivity due to global warming
Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 2. Future climate projections
This study provides an overview of projected changes in climate extremes indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). The temperature‐ and precipitation‐based indices are computed with a consistent methodology for climate change simulations using different emission scenarios in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 3 (CMIP3) and Phase 5 (CMIP5) multimodel ensembles. We analyze changes in the indic…
Climate extremes indices in the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Part 1. Model evaluation in the present climate
This paper provides a first overview of the performance of state‐of‐the‐art global climate models participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) in simulating climate extremes indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI), and compares it to that in the previous model generation (CMIP3). For the first time, the indices based on daily temperature and precipitation are calculated wit…
Observed and simulated temperature extremes during the recent warming hiatus
The discrepancy between recent observed and simulated trends in global mean surface temperature has provoked a debate about possible causes and implications for future climate change projections. However, little has been said in this discussion about observed and simulated trends in global temperature extremes. Here we assess trend patterns in temperature extremes and evaluate the consistency between observed and simulated temperature extremes ov…
Top ten European heatwaves since 1950 and their occurrence in the coming decades
The Russian heatwave in 2010 killed tens of thousands of people, and was by far the worst event in Europe since at least 1950, according to recent studies and a novel universal heatwave index capturing both the duration and magnitude of heatwaves. Here, by taking an improved version of this index, namely the heat wave magnitude index daily, we rank the top ten European heatwaves that occurred in the period 1950–2014, and show the spatial distribu…
Synoptic and meteorological drivers of extreme ozone concentrations over Europe
The present work assesses the relationship between local and synoptic meteorological conditions and surface ozone concentration over Europe in spring and summer months, during the period 1998-2012 using a new interpolated data set of observed surface ozone concentrations over the European domain.Along with local meteorological conditions, the influence of large-scale atmospheric circulation on surface ozone is addressed through a set of airflow i…
When will unusual heat waves become normal in a warming Africa
Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change. In the upcoming decades the occurrence of longer, hotter and more frequent heat waves could have a strong impact on human mortality and crop production. Here, by applying the heat wave magnitude index daily to temperature reanalysis data, we quantify the magnitude and the spatial extent of the most extreme heat waves experienced in Africa between 1979 and October 2015 across diffe…
Influence of blocking on Northern European and Western Russian heatwaves in large climate model ensembles
Better preparedness for summer heatwaves could mitigate their adverse effects on society. This can potentially be attained through an increased understanding of the relationship between heatwaves and one of their main dynamical drivers, atmospheric blocking. In the 1979-2015 period, we find that there is a significant correlation between summer heatwave magnitudes and the number of days influenced by atmospheric blocking in Northern Europe and We…
Facilitating Climate-Smart Investments
Intensification of summer precipitation with shorter time-scales in Europe
While daily extreme precipitation intensities increase with global warming on average at approximately the same rate as the availability of water vapor (∼7%/°C), a debated topic is whether sub-daily extremes increase more. Modelling at convection-permitting scales has been deemed necessary to reproduce extreme summer precipitation at local scale. Here we analyze multi-model ensembles and apply a 3 km horizontal resolution model over four regions …
Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will lower increases in inequalities of four hazard indicators of climate change
Clarifying characteristics of hazards and risks of climate change at 2 °C and 1.5 °C global warming is important for understanding the implications of the Paris Agreement. We perform and analyze large ensembles of 2 °C and 1.5 °C warming simulations. In the 2 °C runs, we find substantial increases in extreme hot days, heavy rainfalls, high streamflow and labor capacity reduction related to heat stress. For example, about half of the world’s popul…
Asking the right questions in adaptation research and practice: Seeing beyond climate impacts in rural Nepal
Adaptation research and practice too often overlooks the wider social context within which climate change is experienced. Mainstream approaches frame adaptation problems in terms of the consequences that flow from biophysical impacts and as a result, we argue, ask the wrong questions. A complementary approach gaining ground in the field, foregrounding the social, economic and political context, reveals differentiation in adaptation need, and how …
Urbanization in megacities increases the frequency of extreme precipitation events far more than their intensity
More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas (UN Population Division 2018 The World's cities in 2018 (UN: New York)), which are especially vulnerable to climate extremes (Field et al 2012 Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation: Special Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)). Urbanization itself is known to increase surface t…
Evaluation of CMIP5 and CMIP6 simulations of historical surface air temperature extremes using proper evaluation methods
Reliable projections of extremes by climate models are becoming increasingly important in the context of climate change and associated societal impacts. Extremes are by definition rare events, characterized by a small sample associated with large uncertainties. The evaluation of extreme events in model simulations thus requires performance measures that compare full distributions rather than simple summaries. This paper proposes the use of the in…
Economic costs of heat-induced reductions in worker productivity due to global warming
Combined impacts of climate and air pollution on human health and agricultural productivity
Climate change and air pollution can interact to amplify risks to human health and crop production. This has significant implications for our ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g. SDGs 2, 3, 13, 15) and for the design of effective mitigation and adaptation policies and risk management. To be able to achieve the SDG targets, closer integration of climate change and air pollution both in terms of impact assessment for human healt…
Perspectives on tipping points in integrated models of the natural and human Earth system: Cascading effects and telecoupling
The Earth system and the human system are intrinsically linked. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to the climate crisis, which is causing unprecedented extreme events and could trigger Earth system tipping elements. Physical and social forces can lead to tipping points and cascading effects via feedbacks and telecoupling, but the current generation of climate-economy models do not generally take account of these interactions and fee…
Increasing spatiotemporal proximity of heat and precipitation extremes in a warming world quantified by a large model ensemble
Increases in climate hazards and their impacts mark one of the major challenges of climate change. Situations in which hazards occur close enough to one another to result in amplified impacts, because systems are insufficiently resilient or because hazards themselves are made more severe, are of special concern. We consider projected changes in such compounding hazards using the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble under a moderate (RCP4.5) emissi…
Gaussian copula modeling of extreme cold and weak-wind events over Europe conditioned on winter weather regimes
A transition to renewable energy is needed to mitigate climate change. In Europe, this transition has been led by wind energy, which is one of the fastest growing energy sources. However, energy demand and production are sensitive to meteorological conditions and atmospheric variability at multiple time scales. To accomplish the required balance between these two variables, critical conditions of high demand and low wind energy supply must be con…
Varieties of approaches to constructing physical climate storylines: A review
The physical climate storyline (PCS) approach is increasingly recognized by the physical climate research community as a tool to produce and communicate decision‐relevant climate risk information. While PCS is generally understood as a single concept, different varieties of the approach are applied according to the aims and purposes of the PCS and the scientists that build them. To unpack this diversity of detail, this article gives an overview o…
Human heat stress could offset potential economic benefits of CO2 fertilization in crop production under a high-emissions scenario
Climate change can significantly impact agriculture, leading to food security challenges. Most previous studies have investigated the direct climate impact on crops while neglecting the impact of heat stress on agricultural labor. Here, we assess the economic consequences of climate impacts on four major crops—maize, soybean, wheat, and rice—for scenarios involving low and high greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis is based on the output from a …
Linking regional economic impacts of temperature-related disasters to underlying climatic hazards
Temperature-induced disasters lead to major human and economic damage, but the relationship between their climatic drivers and impacts is difficult to quantify. In part, this is due to a lack of data with suitable resolution, scale and coverage on impacts and disaster occurrence. Here, we address this gap using new datasets on subnational sector-disaggregated economic productivity and geo-coded disaster locations to quantify the role of climatic …
A better integration of health and economic impact assessments of climate change
Climate change could lead to high economic burden for individuals (i.e. low income and high prices). While economic conditions are important determinants of climate change vulnerability, environmental epidemiological studies focus primarily on the direct impact of temperature on morbidity and mortality without accounting for climate-induced impacts on the economy. More integrated approaches are needed to provide comprehensive assessments of clima…
Earth system resilience and tipping behavior
Anthropogenic climate change, marked by unprecedented extremes, is an immediate concern. The Earth’s limited ability to adapt to abrupt changes within our societal timeframe has raised global alarm. Resilience, the capacity to withstand and recover from disturbances, diminishes as disturbances intensify. For avoiding potential catastrophic changes, it is crucial to identify tipping points, where a change in part of a system becomes self-perpetuat…
Ruminating on sustainable food systems in a net-zero world
The future of hot and dry events in the breadbasket regions of maize
Heatwaves and dry spells can severely impact crop yields, making it crucial to understand the nature of these events to ensure food security in a changing climate. We use the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble to examine the occurrence of hot–dry extremes in key crop-producing regions known as ‘breadbasket regions’, either in single or multiple breadbasket regions simultaneously, focusing on the differences between 1.5 ∘ C and 2 ∘ C global warmi…
Climate change (23 works) · Environmental Science (21 works) · Geography (16 works) · Climate variability and models (15 works) · Climatology (15 works) · Geology (12 works) · Climate model (11 works) · Meteorology (10 works) · Ecology (9 works) · Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations (9 works)