Attribution of 2021 Weather Extreme Events in British Columbia

In British Columbia, and in the Pacific North West America in general, 2021 was a year fraught with extreme weather events. First, in late June 2021 an unprecedented heat wave claimed over 600 lives, followed by in an extreme flood in mid-November that became one of Canada’s one of most expensive natural disasters. In this study, we provide separate attribution of these two events using CMIP6 temperature and precipitation data. For both events, we compare the current climate data with that from prior decades as well as data for the end of the 21^st century under the SSP2.45 scenario. By fitting generalised extreme value distributions to all datasets, we were able to quantify the risk ratios as well as provide analysis of the changing frequency of such extreme events with in a warming climate.