Future Weather and Extremes

In Subtopic (ST) 1.3 “Future Weather and Extremes”, we investigate the physical processes and statistics of weather phenomena with a particular focus on the regional scale and on the frequency and magnitude of weather and climate extremes.

Our main scientific challenge is to assess how and why the day-to-day weather, as well as extreme weather events will change in a warming world. Both weather variability and its modulation in a warming climate can be attributed to a complex combination of changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation, teleconnections, the hydrological cycle, atmospheric composition and interactions with the ocean and land surface. Making progress requires detailed investigation of the physical processes governing weather variability and extremes across scales, ranging from sub-daily predictions to long-term projections. This requires a better understanding of the driving physical processes.

We address this challenging multi-scale problem with a seamless approach that integrates comprehensive observations and complex modelling systems with socio-economic impacts that leads to better predictions of weather, weather extremes and climate, which can inform adaptation strategies. This is achieved by an unprecedented model resolution and estimates that are more robust by generating large model ensembles.

A main societal challenge is the mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The ability to predict the weather and weather related phenomena on sub-daily to synoptic time scales may save lives and infrastructure.