Extreme events impact attribution: A state of the art

Abstract

Summary: Extreme weather events lead to many adverse societal, economic, and environmental consequences. Anthropogenic climate change has been identified as a factor that may have already increased the frequency and intensity of these events. The methods of extreme event attribution (EEA) that quantify the extent to which climate change affected specific recent extreme weather events in the past 20 years have been combined more recently with socio-economic impact data to quantify extreme weather’s impacts attributable to climate change. This extreme event impacts attribution (EEIA) is a quickly developing field that considers which kinds of questions about the impacts of climate change on extreme weather events we should ask, what methods are best suited to answer them, how to interpret the results these methods provide, and what purpose these results can serve. We discuss the methods of EEIA, review EEIA results, and discuss their implications and potential uses.

Keywords

• attribution
• climate change impacts
• extreme weather