Under the background of global warming,extreme weather and climate events may be unprecedented when they occur with increased frequency,evident temporal and spatial clustering (concurrence),stronger persistence and new combinations (compound).This increases the difficulty of predicting extreme events.Extreme weather and climate events,such as persistent heavy rainfall,extreme low temperature,extreme high temperature and drought compound events,heat waves and strong typhoon,have produced a significant influence on economic,social and sustainable development.However,new features of extreme weather and climate events,coupled with associated key processes and relevant mechanism,remain unclear,and the prediction of extreme weather and climate events needs further improvement.This paper first gives a brief introduction of the National Key R&D Program of China for Earth System and Global Change;supported by this program,the new features of extreme weather and climate events causing serious influence over China under changing climate are investigated.Next,the paper explores the physical mechanisms of ocean-land-atmosphere coupling processes that affect extreme weather and climate events,and attempts to seek the precursors for sub-seasonal to seasonal predictions of extreme events.This program aims to develop a new statistical-dynamical combined prediction method of extreme events and establish a new generation of high-resolution numerical prediction in China,along with a detection and attribution system of extreme events.This paper also highlights recent main achievements of this program.