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Climate Extremes: Challenges in Estimating and Understanding Recent Changes in the Frequency and Intensity of Extreme Climate and Weather Events

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Abstract

This paper focuses primarily on extremes in the historical instrumental period. We consider a range of phenomena, including temperature and precipitation extremes, tropical and extra-tropical storms, hydrological extremes, and transient extreme sea-level events. We also discuss the extent to which detection and attribution research has been able to link observed changes to external forcing of the climate system. Robust results are available that detect and often attribute changes in frequency and intensity of temperature extremes to external forcing. There is also some evidence that on a global scale, precipitation extremes have intensified due to forcing. However, robustly detecting and attributing forced changes in other important extremes, such as tropical and extratropical storms or drought remains challenging.

In our review we find that there are multiple challenges that constrain advances in research on extremes. These include the state of the historical observational record, limitations in the statistical and other tools that are used for analyzing observed changes in extremes, limitations in the understanding of the processes that are involved in the production of extreme events, and in the ability to describe the natural variability of extremes with models and other tools.

Despite these challenges, it is clear that enormous progress is being made in the quest to improve the understanding of extreme events, and ultimately, to produce predictive products that will help society to manage the associated risks.

Chapter Contributors

M Donat, O Krueger, S Morak, TQ Murdock, M Schnorbus, V Ryabin, C Tebaldi, XL Wang

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The joint World Meteorological Organization Commission on Climatology (CCl), World Climate Research Program Climate Variability and Predictability project (CLIVAR), and Joint Commission on Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. See http://www.clivar.org/category/panels/etccdi

  2. 2.

    A probability distribution is said to be stable when the average of a sample of independently drawn values from that distribution has a distribution belonging to the same family of distributions (Feller 1971). The Gaussian distribution is an example of a stable distribution. Stability can also be defined in terms of some other types of operations that may be applied to a sample. In particular, max-stable distributions have the property that the maximum value of such a sample again has a distribution within the same family of distributions. The generalized extreme value distribution is max-stable.

  3. 3.

    Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research.

  4. 4.

    See http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/cdmp/forts.html

  5. 5.

    http://www.surfacetemperatures.org/

  6. 6.

    The use of unpaid volunteers, often solicited via the internet.

  7. 7.

    http://www.cicsnc.org/corp/presentations/Scott%20Hausman.pdf (presentation made to the 30th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Ponte Verde, Florida, USA, 15–20 April 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, University of Victoria, 1700 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 2Y2, Canada

    Francis W. Zwiers

  2. Climate Change Research Centre and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, The University of New South Wales UNSW, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Lisa V. Alexander

  3. School of Geosciences, Grant Institute, University of Edinburgh, The King’s Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JW, UK

    Gabriele C. Hegerl

  4. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, NOAA, Princeton University, Forrestal Campus 201 Forrestal Road, Princeton, NJ, 08540-6649, USA

    Thomas R. Knutson

  5. NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC, 28801-5001, USA

    James P. Kossin

  6. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement (LSCE), CNRS, Orme des Merisiers/Bat. 701 C.E. Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, 91191, Paris, France

    Phillippe Naveau

  7. School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Building 11, Clayton Campus, Wellington Road, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Neville Nicholls

  8. Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Universitätstrasse 16, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christoph Schär & Sonia I. Seneviratne

  9. Climate Research Division, Environment Canada, 4905 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON, M3H 5T4, Canada

    Xuebin Zhang

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  1. Francis W. Zwiers
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  2. Lisa V. Alexander
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  3. Gabriele C. Hegerl
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  10. Xuebin Zhang
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Correspondence to Francis W. Zwiers .

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  1. World Climate Research Programme, World Meteorological Organization, bis, Avenue de la Paix 7, Geneva 2, 1211, Switzerland

    Ghassem R. Asrar

  2. Earth System Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Center Green Drive 3090, Boulder, 80301, Colorado, USA

    James W. Hurrell

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Zwiers, F.W. et al. (2013). Climate Extremes: Challenges in Estimating and Understanding Recent Changes in the Frequency and Intensity of Extreme Climate and Weather Events. In: Asrar, G., Hurrell, J. (eds) Climate Science for Serving Society. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6692-1_13

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