Weather and climate hazards cause too many fatalities each year. These weather and climate hazards are projected to increase in frequency and intensity due to global warming. Here, we use a disaster database to investigate continentally aggregated fatality data for trends. We also examine whether modes of climate variability affect the propensity of fatalities. Furthermore, we quantify fatality risk by computing effective return periods which depend on modes of climate variability. We find statistically significant increasing trends for heat waves and floods for worldwide aggregated data. Significant trends occur in the number of fatalities in Asia where fatalities due to heat waves and floods are increasing, while storm-related fatalities are decreasing. However, when normalized by population size, the trends are no longer significant. Furthermore, the number of fatalities can be well described probabilistically by an extreme value distribution, a generalized Pareto distribution (GPD). Based on the GPD, we evaluate covariates which affect the number of fatalities aggregated over all hazard types. For this purpose, we evaluate combinations of modes of climate variability and socio-economic indicators as covariates. We find no evidence for a significant direct impact from socio-economic indicators; however, we find significant evidence for the impact from modes of climate variability on the number of fatalities. The important modes of climate variability affecting the number of fatalities are tropical cyclone activity, modes of sea surface temperature and atmospheric teleconnection patterns. This offers the potential of predictability of the number of fatalities given that most of these climate modes are predictable on seasonal to inter-annual time scales.

中文翻译：

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天气和气候灾害导致的极高死亡风险及其与大规模气候变率的联系

天气和气候灾害每年造成太多人死亡。由于全球变暖，预计这些天气和气候灾害的频率和强度会增加。在这里，我们使用灾难数据库来调查大陆汇总的死亡数据趋势。我们还研究了气候变化模式是否会影响死亡倾向。此外，我们通过计算取决于气候变异模式的有效回归期来量化死亡风险。我们发现热浪和洪水的全球汇总数据具有统计上显着的增长趋势。亚洲的死亡人数呈显着趋势，因热浪和洪水造成的死亡人数正在增加，而与风暴相关的死亡人数正在减少。然而，当按人口规模归一化时，趋势不再显着。此外，死亡人数可以通过极值分布、广义帕累托分布 (GPD) 从概率上很好地描述。基于 GPD，我们评估了影响所有危险类型汇总的死亡人数的协变量。为此，我们将气候变异模式和社会经济指标的组合作为协变量进行评估。我们没有发现社会经济指标有重大直接影响的证据；然而，我们发现了气候变异模式对死亡人数的影响的重要证据。影响死亡人数的重要气候变率模式是热带气旋活动、海面温度模式和大气遥相关模式。