Theme: Trends and Extremes
This Theme pursues the OzEWEX objective to describe, analyse and attribute observed variability and change in averages and extremes of water- and energy-related variables. Detection and attribution of changes to the averages and extremes of climate variables such as rainfall, temperature, evapotranspiration, winds, streamflow, and storm tides is fundamental to support efforts to adapt to future climate change. However, progress has been hampered in many cases because of the limited availability of high-quality, long observational data records, and the complexity and spatiotemporal range of the underlying processes.
This Theme promotes analysing observational and modelling data to improve understanding of change in societally-relevant climate variables. It encourages such activities as (1) developing and making available enhanced observational datasets and derived indices with suitable characteristics (e.g., record length, measurement frequency, quality) for assessment of long-term change in societally-important climate variables; (2) bringing together experts from a diversity of disciplines including meteorology and climate science, hydrology, and statistics, to develop methods for the detection and attribution of changes to extremes; (3) developing and disseminating rigorous statistical methods to support the detection and attribution of changes to climate variables; (4) developing rapid-response assessment methods to enable fraction-of-attributable risk calculations of recent extreme climate events; and (5) improving links between fundamental climate science, impacts science and risk-based decision makers, to ensure that existing and new scientific discoveries are rapidly made available for use in management and policy development.
read articles – current members
