In the online seminar series "Perspectives on climate sciences: from historical developments to future frontiers" (2020–2021), well-known and established scientists from several fields – including mathematics, physics, climate science and ecology – presented their perspectives on the evolution of climate science and on relevant scientific concepts. In this paper, we first give an overview of the content of the seminar series, and then we introduce the written contributions to this special issue.

We introduce ClimaMeter, a tool offering real-time insights into weather extreme events. Our tool unveils how climate change and natural variability affect these events, affecting communities worldwide. Our research equips policymakers and the public with essential knowledge, fostering informed decisions and enhancing climate resilience. We analyzed four distinct events, showcasing ClimaMeter's global relevance.

We provide a novel approach to diagnose the strength of the ocean–atmosphere coupling by using both a reduced order model and reanalysis data. Our findings suggest the ocean–atmosphere dynamics presents a rich variety of features, moving from a chaotic to a coherent coupled dynamics, mainly attributed to the atmosphere and only marginally to the ocean. Our observations suggest further investigations in characterizing the occurrence and spatial dependency of the ocean–atmosphere coupling.