AMOS ACT Themed Seminar Session - Climate Change - 15th Mar 2012

March 15, 2012

When: Thursday, 15th March 5:00pm for 5:30pm
Venue: CSIRO Discovery Centre

Nibbles and drinks will be available from 5.30 pm.

The AMOS ACT Branch is inviting all to this themed seminar session on climate change. We have one speaker lined up:

Dr. Greg Holland

When did Climate Change Become Observable? And What is the Impact on Weather Extremes?

Societal vulnerability to weather arises largely from relatively rare events at the extremes of the spectrum. Such high-impact weather includes: extended droughts, heat waves, major hurricanes, extreme local rainfall and snowfall, ice storms, European wind storms, and severe local storms and tornadoes. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, our vulnerability to property loss and societal disruption is increasing as society becomes more complex and interconnected, and as private, industrial and commercial development expands in high risk areas. Understanding and predicting variations and changes in weather extremes is thus a major societal issue, encompassing urban commercial and industrial planning, watershed maintenance and design, insurance types and premiums, and government policy.

In this presentation we first examine the difficulties of differentiating climate change from variability and the question of when observable human-induced climate change commenced. We then discuss the use of extreme value theory to objectively assess the intensity and frequency of extreme events from climate simulations that are necessarily truncated by inadequate model resolution. These two themes lead to the suggestion that weather extremes respond strongly to climate variability and change and, somewhat non-intuitively, that such variability and change is best interpreted through weather extremes.