Noah S. Diffenbaugh - New York Times - 29 Dec , 2017
This was a year of devastating weather, including historic hurricanes and wildfires here in the United States. Did climate change play a role? Increasingly, scientists are able to answer that question — and increasingly, the answer is yes. My lab recently published a new framework for examining connections between global warming and extreme events. Other scientists are doing similar research. How would we go about testing whether global warming has influenced the events that occurred this year? |
| Source: New York Times |
Tobias Ellenrieder - Munich Re - 1 Dec 2017
Harvey was the wettest tropical cyclone ever to hit the USA. In parts of Texas, unprecedented flooding occurred. The direct economic losses are likely to be as much as US$ 85bn, which would make Harvey the second-costliest hurricane on record after Katrina.
Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey’s rainfallKerry Emanuel - Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences - October 4 2017
... a recently developed physics-based risk assessment method can be applied to assessing the probabilities of extreme hurricane rainfall, allowing for quantitative assessment of hurricane flooding risks in all locations affected by such storms
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Quantifying the influence of global warming on unprecedented extreme climate events
Noah S. Diffenbaugh et al. - Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences - 9 May 2017
We apply four attribution metrics to four climate variables at each available point on a global grid. We find that historical global warming has increased the severity and probability of the hottest monthly and daily events at more than 80% of the observed area and has increased the probability of the driest
and wettest events at approximately half of the observed area.
Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (2016): Summary
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2016.
The observed frequency, intensity, and duration of some extreme weather events have been changing as the climate system has warmed. Such changes in extreme weather events also have been simulated in climate models, and some of the reasons for them are well understood ... The extent to which climate change influences an individual weather or climate event is more difficult to determine. It involves consideration of a host of possible natural and anthropogenic factors (e.g., large-scale circulation, internal modes of climate variability, anthropogenic climate change, aerosol effects) that combine to produce the specific conditions of an event.
