Climate Change and Extreme Weather: 32 Takes on 28 Events from 2014 - by Bob Henson

The science of deciphering how much long-term climate change influences shorter-term weather and climate events continues to blossom.  On Thursday the American Meteorological Society (AMS) released its fourth annual special issue of the Bulletin of the AMS devoted to these attribution studies.  Launched in 2012 as an experiment, the project hit a nerve: researchers and the public were both intensely interested in the connection between human-produced greenhouse gases and high-profile, high-impact weather.  This year’s batch of studies, which focuses on events from 2014, is the largest yet: a total of 32, including more than 100 researchers from 20 countries looking at 28 extreme weather and climate events from all seven continents.  New topics this year include tropical cyclones, forest fires, and anomalies in sea surface temperature and sea level pressure.  For about half of the events studied in this year’s AMS report, scientists found that human-induced climate change played a measurable role in making the event stronger and/or more likely.

Each year the project editors invite researchers from around the world to choose a particular event and examine it through the lens of climate change and its potential influence.  Because the report is an open digest of sorts, it includes a variety of techniques in which particular events are put in a larger context using models and observations.  Attribution science remains a young field, and there’s still room for experimentation. 

A couple of U.S. highlights
There is far too much interesting science in this BAMS report to cover in a short blog post.  For those most interested in U.S. weather, the report has plenty to chew on, including coverage of 2014’s burst of hurricane activity near Hawaii; the year’s drought-stoked wildfire season in California; the active winter storm track across much of North America in 2013-14; that winter’s Midwestern cold; and the chilly conditions that prevailed over much of the East.  Strikingly, each of these events recurred to at least some extent in 2015.  This is itself a fascinating phenomenon, one that goes unaddressed in the report--but that’s understandable, given that the report’s mandate is to focus on one year at a time.  Below is some more detail on a couple of the U.S. events that I found particularly interesting.

Read more at Climate Change and Extreme Weather:  32 Takes on 28 Events from 2014