Extreme event attribution (EEA) emerged in the early 2000s to assess the impact of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events. Since then, EEA has expanded into different approaches that help us understand how climate change influences these events.
In unconditional approaches, such as the risk-based method, the oceanic and atmospheric conditions are largely left unconstrained. In contrast, conditional approaches focus on constraining the specific dynamics that lead to an event. One example is the analogues approach, where the synoptic atmospheric circulation is held relatively fixed. Both approaches can be used to assess changes in the likelihood, intensity, or both, of extreme events.
In this short course, we will examine the robustness of the analogues method for EEA, explore different strategies for defining analogues, and discuss their applications in attribution studies.