An approach towards addressing meteorological factors for extreme event impacts

The ClimXtreme program funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research is designed to address Physics and Processes, Statistics, and Impacts of meteorological extreme events, considering both the past period covered by instrumental measurements, and future climate scenarios. In its branch on impacts, the impact of hazards in Europe (convective events, severe precipitation, heat waves and droughts, and large scale storms) shall be considered in order to identify the underlying relevant weather situations and the antecedent meteorological factors. The specific characteristics of the extreme events shall also be explored. Aiming at a better understanding of the impacts of the extremes, investigations shall go beyond quantification of the local severity of a hazard. The assumption is that there is also an influence of weather and climate on exposure and vulnerability. These factors for the occurrence and the magnitude of damaging impacts  thus depend on local climatology, the occurrence of specific weather sequences augmenting vulnerability, or the occurrence of specific combinations of factors which individually needn’t be extreme (compound events).  One starting point are thus already existing impact models, which do not take (all of) these factors into account. Results from numerical climate models will be used to estimate the future change of risks under climate change.