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Abstract

The frequency of occurrence of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, severe storms, and extreme precipitation has increased dramatically in recent years and is expected to further increase with rising global temperatures. Extreme weather events and their changing characteristic due to rising global temperatures have a large societal impact. Exemplary, extremely warm summers can lead to severe health problems and are thus associated with an increased mortality. Furthermore, economic impacts, such as crop failure and water shortage, and political aspects, such as climate migration and general crisis management are associated with extremely warm summers. Reliable and precise predictability years in advance of these high-impact events would be crucial to reduce potential impacts. We use the demonstrated processes connecting the North Atlantic circulation and European temperatures (Hellmich et al., in review) to enhance the prediction skill of extremely warm European summers. The North Atlantic heat inertia can drive extremely warm European summers on sub-decadal time scales, thus acting as a precursor for the occurrence of such extreme events. Here we demonstrate how the sub-decadal North Atlantic heat inertia can be used to predict extremely warm European summers several years in advance, using a decadal hindcast ensemble based on the Max-Planck-Institute Earth system model.