A New Avenue of Research for Improving the Predictability of Weather Extremes - The Eastern Mediterranen as a Case Study

Extreme weather events have long been considered challenging to predict. It is likely that global warming will trigger extreme weather in many regions of the globe and especially over the Mediterranean ´hot spot´. Therefore, extreme weather events have been selected as one of the grand challenges of the World Climate Research Program.

The intrinsic predictability of a weather system, or any dynamical system, depends on its persistence and its active number of degrees of freedom. Recent developments in dynamical systems theory allow to compute these metrics for atmospheric configurations (1). In most of the mid-latitudes, synoptic scale patterns exert a strong control on regional weather, thus, stimulating a broad interest, especially in weather forecasting. Recently, we have integrated the dynamical systems approach with a synoptic classification algorithm over the Eastern Mediterranean (2).  It was shown that the dynamical systems perspective provides an extremely informative tool for evaluating the predictability of synoptic patterns and especially of weather extremes.

The novel perspective, which leverages a dynamical systems approach to investigate the predictability of extreme weather events, outlines a new avenue of research that may be fruitfully applied at operational weather and climate forecasting services in the Mediterranean Region and around the globe.

References