In the 2023/24 season, Rio de Janeiro experienced record-breaking heatwaves linked to climate change and El Niño. Our study shows global warming made these extreme temperatures at least 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Heat-related deaths surged, with climate change contributing to 1 in 3 fatalities during the peak event. Without adaptation, future heatwaves will claim even more lives. This underscores the urgent need for policies to mitigate climate impacts from escalating heat threats.

Our study created a unique database that tracks vegetation health across Spain and the Balearic Islands from 1981 to now, updated every two weeks. By using satellite images from multiple sources, we provide accurate and consistent data that helps detect changes in vegetation due to factors like fires. This tool is crucial for farmers, environmental managers, and policymakers to monitor and protect plant life, ensuring better management of natural resources and agricultural productivity.

A database of reference evapotranspiration (ET_o) was obtained and made publicly available for Spain covering the 1961–2014 period at a spatial resolution of 1.1 km. Previous to ET_o calculation, data of required climate variables were interpolated and validated, and the uncertainty was estimated. Obtained ET_o values can be used to calculate irrigation requirements, improve drought studies (our main motivation) and study the impact of climate change, as a positive trend was detected.

Spanish TEmperature At Daily scale (STEAD) is a new daily gridded maximum and minimum temperature dataset for Spain. It covers the whole territory of peninsular Spain and the Balearic and Canary Islands at a 5 km × 5 km spatial resolution for the 1901–2014 period. This product is useful not only for climatic analysis but also to provide support to any other climate-related variable and for decision-making purposes.

Drought events are of great importance in most Mediterranean climate regions, and the impacts caused on rainfed crops are particularly evident. In this study the impacts of drought on two representative rainfed crops in Spain (wheat and barley) are assessed by testing various worldwide drought indices and two datasets at different spatial resolution.