ClimateCalendar - Details

18.01.2018 - 18.01.2018
Discussion

KlimaCampus Colloquium

Increasing risks of extreme weather events are the most noticeable and damaging manifestation of anthropogenic climate change. In the aftermath of an extreme event, policymakers are often called upon to make timely and sensitive decisions about rebuilding and managing present and future risks. Information regarding whether, where, and how present day and future risks are changing is needed to adequately inform these decisions. But this information is often not available and when it is, it is often not presented in a systematic way. A seamless approach to extreme event attribution and future risk assessment using the same set of model ensembles could be used to provide such information on past, present and future hazard risk. Based on six case studies on different types of events we find that this approach improves the robustness of future risk assessment and attribution statements alike but major challenges remain. In particular model evaluation and identifying impact-relevant event definitions that are at the same time useful in a range of decisions.