How to Discover Whether Global Warming Impacts Extreme Weather

When it comes to understanding the relationship between global warming and extreme weather, it's important to ask exactly the right questions. Now, scientists have taken a closer look at global warming's influence on extreme weather to see what might be in store for the future.

Extreme climate and weather events are becoming more common in many parts of the world. Yet because high-quality weather records only go back about 100 years, it's difficult to say wether or not global warming affects particular extreme events.

"The media are often focused on whether global warming caused a particular event," said Noah Diffenbaugh, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, in a news release. "The more useful question for real-world decisions is: 'Is the probability of a particular event statistically different now compared with a climate without human influence?'"

So how can we examine the relationship between weather and global warming? Three elements are needed: a long record of climate observations, a large collection of climate model experiments that accurately simulate the variations in climate, and advanced statistical techniques to analyze both the observations and climate models

"If we look over the last decade in the United States, there have been more than 70 events that have each caused at least $1 billion in damage, and a number of those have been considerably more costly," said Diffenbaugh. "Understanding whether the probability of those high-impact events has changed can help us to plan for future extreme events, and to value the costs and benefits of avoiding future global warming."

The findings reveal the challenge of examining global warming in relation to weather events. More specifically, it shows that with just a few decades or a century of high-quality weather data, it's difficult to make sense of events that might occur only ever so often in a theoretical climate without human influence. That said, it's obvious that more research needs to be conducted to see human impact on weather.

The findings will be presented at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting.

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