Extreme climate events such as droughts and heat waves exert strong impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Estimations of the risks of climate extremes typically focus on one variable in isolation. In this study, we present a method to examine the likelihood of concurrent extreme temperature and precipitation modes at the interannual scale, including compound cool/dry and cool/wet events during the cold season as well as compound hot/dry and hot/wet events during the warm season. A comparison of changes in the likelihood of such joint climate extremes was then conducted between the first (1961–1987) and second (1988–2014) halves of the full observed records.

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