Extreme weather and climate conditions, such as recent events unprecedented in the observational record, have high-impact consequences globally. Some of these events would have been arguably nearly impossible without human-made climate change, and broke records by large margins. Furthermore, compounding hazards and cascading risks are becoming evident. Continuing warming does not only increase the frequency and intensity of events like these, or other until now unprecedented extremes, it also potentially increases the risk of crossing tipping points and triggering abrupt unprecedented impacts. To increase preparedness for high impact climate events, developing novel methods, models and process-understanding that capture these events and their impacts is paramount.
This session aims to bring together the latest research quantifying and understanding high-impact climate events in past, present and future climates. We welcome studies ranging across spatial and temporal scales, and covering compound, cascading, and connected extremes as well as worst-case scenarios and storylines, with the ultimate goal to provide actionable climate information to increase preparedness to such extreme high-impact events.
We invite work addressing high impact extreme events via, but not limited to, observations, model experiments and intercomparisons, climate projections including large ensembles and unseen events, diverse storyline approaches such as event-based or dynamical storylines, insights from paleo archives and attribution studies. We also especially welcome contributions focusing on physical understanding of high-impact events, on their ecological and socioeconomic impacts, as well as on approaches to potentially limit such impacts
The session is sponsored by the World Climate Research Programme lighthouse activity on Understanding High-Risk Events.