ECRA Meeting - Cambridge
ECRA: High Impact Events and Climate Change
European Climate Research Alliance
There is growing awareness that climate change cannot solely be considered as a "mean state" modification. Changes in the characteristics, frequency, and severity of extreme events are typically responsible for the most important impacts, and consequently are amongst the most significant aspects of climate change to understand and predict. This Collaborative Programme will examine how high impact events work, how they can be simulated accurately in numerical models, and how we might be able to project future changes reliably.
Currently suggested science topics
- We suggest a strategy that starts from fundamental physical concepts, continues via process understanding and goes towards the best possible numerical simulations of the global and regional changes of extreme events, including composition-climate interactions and feedback.
- Scale interactions in the atmosphere including dynamics/energetics and composition, for example in the context of mid-latitude blockings or tropical cyclones.
- Critical processes involved in high impact events, for example the factors that govern the structure and characteristics of extratropical and tropical cyclones, and how these factors are influenced by greenhouse gas and other climate forcings, including stratospheric composition changes.
- Evaluation and improvement of numerical simulations of high impact events, including assessment of the extent to which increases in resolution improve the fidelity of numerical simulations.
- Strategies for improving the reliability of projections for changes in high impact events.
- Propagation of large scale climate change simulations to the regional scale using statistical downscaling and high resolution regional modelling.
- How do the statistics of severe weather affect composition and vice versa? Heat waves and future air quality, severe (tropical) storms/convective events (tropical UT/LS composition) and the feedback of changing composition on climate.
For further information and to submit an abstract for consideration, please register using the online form.
