EGU22-10422
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-10422
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Attribution of 2021 Weather Extreme Events in British Columbia

Elizaveta Malinina1, Nathan Gillett1, Megan Kirchmeier-Young1, Xuebin Zhang1, Faron Anslow2, and Francis Zwiers2
Elizaveta Malinina et al.
  • 1Climate Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Canada
  • 2Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada

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 21st 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.

How to cite: Malinina, E., Gillett, N., Kirchmeier-Young, M., Zhang, X., Anslow, F., and Zwiers, F.: Attribution of 2021 Weather Extreme Events in British Columbia, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-10422, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-10422, 2022.