ClimaTea Journal Club: "Attributing extreme events to anthropogenic forcing"

Date: 

Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: 

HUCE Seminar Room

GS Jiahua Guo will be discussing Lewis and Karoly (2013) and Perkins et al. (2014), attached. She summarizes the discussion below:

The Australian ‘angry summer” of 2012/2013 was the warmest on record since1910. Such high temperatures are also coincident with bush fires and severe flooding.  Before the summer, late onset of the Australian monsoon and below average rainfall primed the continent for extremely hot summer weather. This paper (Lewis and Karoly 2013) is trying to consider the possible anthropogenic contribution to extreme seasonal temperatures in Australia. Even though they cannot attribute a particular event to anthropogenic climatechange, they are trying to investigate whether and to what degree anthropogenic influences contribute to the probability of an extreme event occurring? They compared different experiments in CMIP5 and used fraction of attributable risk to show that the likelihood of extreme Australian summer temperatures was increased at least 2.5 times due to human influences. Natural climatic variations alone are unlikely to have caused the record Australian summer of 2013. By using a similar approach, Perkins et al. (2014) also concluded that human activity has increased the risk of experiencing the hot Australian summer of 2012/2013 in terms of simulated heat wave frequency and intensity.

 

lewiskaroly_2013.pdf349 KB
perkinsetal_2014.pdf450 KB