Extreme event attribution at Deutscher Wetterdienst - status and plans

So-called "attribution studies" can be used to estimate the extent to which human-induced climate change is responsible for the change of occurrence frequency and intensity of individual weather or climate extremes. For such statistical analyses, mainly climate simulations with specially selected boundary conditions are used, as observational time series are often not yet sufficiently long.

For the production of rapid attribution studies, which publish results shortly after the event, a protocol has been developed in recent years by the World Weather Attribution Initiative (WWA, https://www.worldweatherattribution.org) and a Copernicus project. Many of the processing steps are currently carried out in the KNMI Climate Explorer (https://climexp.knmi.nl), an online application developed by the Dutch weather service and made freely available. The German Weather Service (DWD) uses the present protocol for its contributions to international attribution studies of the World Weather Attribution and carries out its own analyses.

Within the framework of “ClimXtreme - Climate Change and Extreme Events” (https://climxtreme.net), a research network funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the DWD is developing a workflow that automates many steps of an attribution analysis for extreme events occurring in Germany, including but not limited to performing calculations and creating figures. This reduces the processing time as well as ensures the robustness of results and enables researchers to focus on aspects of the attribution study that require expert knowledge.

The presentation will provide an overview of the current state of research, show results of attribution studies, and give an outlook on developments in the coming years.