CLIVAR Research Focus: Attribution and Prediction of Extreme Events

Weather and climate extremes affect every aspect of our society, and there has been an increase in damage associated to weather and climate extreme events. Society is increasingly asking for information on the causes of extremes and an ability to predict these extremes on time scales from days to seasons to centuries. Human activities such as the emission of greenhouse gases have affected some extremes. Large scale variations of the climate system such as the El Niņo-Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation also modulate the occurrence and intensity of extreme events.

This CLIVAR Research Focus involves several major research themes ranging from data acquisition to process understanding. They include the identification of the key modes of ocean-atmosphere variability impacting the magnitude and frequency extreme events, both now and in the future; improving observational data sets, providing higher temporal and spatial resolution for ocean-atmosphere processes; model development, addressing observational based approaches, improving variability in ocean-atmosphere simulations relevant to extreme events; and investigating the physical mechanisms leading to changes in high impact, societally relevant, weather and climate extreme events.