CDEP Agent: Connecting Meteorologically Detected Temporal Compound Events to Real-World Documentary Evidence
Abstract
Compound drought-to-extreme-precipitation (CDEP) events are recognized in climate science as a growing driver of extreme impact, but whether this recognition carries over into real-world early warning and post-event documentation is unknown, so a meteorologically real CDEP event may pass with neither advance warning nor any later record. Here we present CDEP Agent, an auditable LLM-agent framework that tests this mismatch directly by linking CDEP candidates detected from meteorological reanalysis to real-world hazard and impact evidence across sources with different spatial scales, temporal resolutions, and reporting conventions. Using California as a case study, we identify 408 candidate CDEP events from ERA5 observations during 2021-2025 and evaluate each against the U.S. Drought Monitor, NOAA Storm Events, and public webpages along five dimensions: antecedent drought, extreme rainfall, local impact, hazard-impact attribution, and explicit drought-to-rainfall linkage. Only 34.3% of candidates are corroborated on both hazard components, and just 1.5% are ever explicitly linked to their antecedent drought, indicating that most meteorologically detected CDEP events go undocumented and their compound nature almost never enters the record at all. Our framework gives climate scientists a way to test physical event definitions against what actually gets documented, and gives social scientists, economists, and disaster-response agencies a provenance-linked evidence base for compound events that current warning and reporting systems largely fail to capture.
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BibTeX
@misc{li2026cdep,
title = {{CDEP Agent: Connecting Meteorologically Detected Temporal Compound Events to Real-World Documentary Evidence}},
author = {Zhuoran Li and Weiyi Kong and Boer Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.28628},
eprint = {2608.28628},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28628},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - CDEP Agent: Connecting Meteorologically Detected Temporal Compound Events to Real-World Documentary Evidence
AU - Zhuoran Li
AU - Weiyi Kong
AU - Boer Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.28628
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28628
AB - Compound drought-to-extreme-precipitation (CDEP) events are recognized in climate science as a growing driver of extreme impact, but whether this recognition carries over into real-world early warning and post-event documentation is unknown, so a meteorologically real CDEP event may pass with neither advance warning nor any later record. Here we present CDEP Agent, an auditable LLM-agent framework that tests this mismatch directly by linking CDEP candidates detected from meteorological reanalysis to real-world hazard and impact evidence across sources with different spatial scales, temporal resolutions, and reporting conventions. Using California as a case study, we identify 408 candidate CDEP events from ERA5 observations during 2021-2025 and evaluate each against the U.S. Drought Monitor, NOAA Storm Events, and public webpages along five dimensions: antecedent drought, extreme rainfall, local impact, hazard-impact attribution, and explicit drought-to-rainfall linkage. Only 34.3% of candidates are corroborated on both hazard components, and just 1.5% are ever explicitly linked to their antecedent drought, indicating that most meteorologically detected CDEP events go undocumented and their compound nature almost never enters the record at all. Our framework gives climate scientists a way to test physical event definitions against what actually gets documented, and gives social scientists, economists, and disaster-response agencies a provenance-linked evidence base for compound events that current warning and reporting systems largely fail to capture.
ER -