Speaker
Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (KNMI)
Title
Extreme event attribution: how rare was it and was it due to climate change?
Abstract
Whenever an extreme weather or climate event happens, two questions are immediately posed: "how rare was it and was it due to climate change?" The last years has seen a lot of progress in our ability to answer these questions, albeit with the second one reformulated to "how was the probability of the event occurring changed by climate change?". The answers come from SST-forced atmospheric models, from coupled climate models and from statistical models applied to observational data. I will discuss the strong and weak points of these methods and give applications of one or more of these methods to the 2010 Russia heat waves, the 2013/2014 winter in North America and Europe, the 4-day heavy rainfall in Central Europe that caused the Elbe and Danube to flood in June 2013, the 2013/2014 winter precipitation in the UK, the extreme one-day precipitation in the Netherlands on 28 July 2014, and the UK floods of December 2015.
Presentation slides
Additional materials
See https://www.knmi.nl/over-het-knmi/onze-mensen/geert-jan-van-oldenborgh
