Abstract
Abstract
Heatwaves rank among the most damaging climate extremes, with rising impacts on human health, ecosystems, and infrastructure. Despite substantial advances, heatwave research is still largely fragmented across regions, event types, and individual case studies, lacking a unified framework for characterizing heatwave evolution across different climatic regimes and spatial scales. Here, we present a framework, termed CELL, that tracks heatwaves as connected structures through space and time, enabling analysis of co-evolving thermodynamic and dynamical conditions throughout their lifecycles. Heatwaves globally exhibit pronounced propagation, expansion, and intensity changes throughout their lifecycle. Based on dominant thermodynamic and dynamical conditions during the mature stage, we classify global heatwaves into eight types that further consolidate into three principal environmental regimes: an extratropical circulation regime, a tropical oceanic subsidence regime, and a tropical continental surface-heating regime. Despite their diversity, global heatwaves exhibit coherent geographical distributions and preferred evolutionary pathways, revealing an physically interpretable organization underlying global heatwave diversity. These results highlight the value of representing climate extremes as evolving event– environment systems rather than isolated threshold exceedances.