Anthropogenic climate change has increased the frequency and magnitude of weather and climate hazards such as droughts, heatwaves, heavy precipitation, wildfires, and tropical cyclones, often with severe societal impacts. However, varying confidence in attributing observed trends to anthropogenic activity and biases in reproducing extreme event characteristics in climate models present challenges to projecting future risks from weather and climate hazards under various climate scenarios.
Understanding and accurately projecting changes in these hazards, their compounding nature, and their interactions with local socioeconomics and population changes is as complex as it is important to avoid future harm. This requires conversations across a broad range of disciplines: physical sciences, climate risk-modelling, statistics and machine learning, geography, and socioeconomic sciences. Recent record-breaking extreme weather events highlight the urgent need to improve our scientific understanding and modelling capacities for informed adaptation measures, policy decisions, and early warning systems.
This session showcases recent research progress in our understanding of weather and climate hazards under past, present, and future climate conditions, including advances in modelling and projections over decadal to centennial timescales. By fostering interdisciplinary discussions, we aim to identify outstanding research questions and form new collaborations; for instance, which hazards receive less attention from the community in specific geographical regions? Which hazard sectors should work more closely with weather and climate scientists to make progress?
We invite contributions on the changing risk and prediction from natural hazards, including but not limited to studies of:
- Detection and attribution of climate and weather hazards and impacts
- Drivers and trends in unprecedented and compound weather extremes
- Advances in climate and weather hazard and impact modelling
- Trends in hazards on decadal to centennial timescales
- Extreme weather early warning systems
- Global weather and climate teleconnections and their links to environmental hazards and impacts
-Interactions between climate and weather hazards with local socioeconomics and adaptation strategies
Karin van der Wiel, Colin Raymond