Probing the Unfathomable: Physical Climate Storlylines of Unseen Extremes

WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF

Recent unprecedented extremes such as the 2023 New Year's Day warm spell in Europe, the 2022 summer heat and drought in China and Europe, the 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, the 2021 floods in northwest Germany and the 2020 Siberian heat anomaly broke previously observed record intensities many times over. Based on the observations up to the year before the event, some of these record-breaking extremes were unimaginable. Given the extraordinary intensity of the event, some media and scientists raised the question of whether the extremes were intensifying faster than predicted by climate models. In the following, I address this question and highlight some of the challenges that such events pose for the widely used methods of model assessment and attribution. I also discuss ways to quantify the potential intensity of record-breaking events and very rare extremes in the near future.

Time:

6 February 2024, 10:30 - 11:30 a.m.

Place:

WSL Birmensdorf, lecture theatre, and Zoom webinar

Speaker:

Prof. Dr Erich Fischer

Moderation:

Gian-Kasper Plattner

Language:

German