In the climate system, extreme events or transitions between climate attractors are of primarily importance for understanding the impact of climate change. Recent extreme heat waves with huge impacts are striking examples. However, it is very hard to study those events with conventional approaches, because of the lack of statistics, because they are too rare for historical data and because realistic models are too complex to be run long enough.

We cope with this lack of data issue using rare event simulations. Using some of the best climate models, we oversample extremely rare events and obtain several hundreds more events than with usual climate runs, at a fixed numerical cost. Coupled with deep neural networks this approach improves drastically the prediction of extreme heat waves.

This shed new light on the fluid mechanics processes which lead to extreme heat waves. We will describe quasi-stationary patterns of turbulent Rossby waves that lead to global teleconnection patterns in connection with heat waves and analyze their dynamics. We stress the relevance of these patterns for recently observed extreme heat waves and the prediction potential of our approach.