{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/2506-10660","title":"Pushing the Limits of Extreme Weather: Constructing Extreme Heatwave Storylines with Differentiable Climate Models","arxiv_id":"2506.10660","date":"2025-06-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tim Whittaker","Alejandro Di Luca"],"abstract":"Understanding the plausible upper bounds of extreme weather events is essential for risk assessment in a warming climate. Existing methods, based on large ensembles of physics-based models, are often computationally expensive or lack the fidelity needed to simulate rare, high-impact extremes. Here, we present a novel framework that leverages a differentiable hybrid climate model, NeuralGCM, to optimize initial conditions and generate physically consistent worst-case heatwave trajectories. Applied to the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, our method produces temperature anomalies up to 3.7 $^\\circ$C above the most extreme member of a 75-member ensemble. These trajectories feature intensified atmospheric blocking and amplified Rossby wave patterns--hallmarks of severe heat events. Our results demonstrate that differentiable climate models can efficiently explore the upper tails of event likelihoods, providing a powerful new approach for constructing targeted storylines of extreme weather under climate change.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10660v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10660v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"2506-10660","repo_url":"https://github.com/timwhittaker/extremestorylines","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"jax","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"blocking","task_name":"Blocking"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}