#8 We're all in this together

This week I hope to prove how extensive the attribution community is, and it may be far closer to home than you once thought…

Paramount to many event attribution studies is the role of Weather@home...essentially using screensaver energy of volunteers’ home computers instead of needing one huge supercomputer (note this was used in the Storm Desmond study for the regional modelling). Climateprediction.net (weather@home’s home) is the largest ensemble of climate modelling to date. Previously, it had shown how capable it was with the ability to increase understanding of large-scale climate processesat low resolutions. It then proved its competence in performing high resolution regional models…and now can even run high resolution models for global simulations…all of this in a decade…pretty great stuff.

But this isn't the only community run initiative; combatting the issue of limited observational data is project "Weather Rescue", with the aim of “unearthing forgotten weather records from across Europe”. Essentially, they are digitising weather observations that had been produced every day since 1860 for Western Europe. I asked Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading, and lead scientist for weatherrescue.org (also the man responsible for producing some of my favourite climate GIFs) whether any papers had been published using this data. He stated that “we are still rescuing the data”. However, he did lead me to their current example of the 1903 Ulysses storm if you fancy taking a look. Given that so many eventattribution studies have struggled due to the lack of observational data, this project has the potential to be super important in attribution of Western Europe extreme events.

Why do I think these projects are so important?

Extreme events are of course rare, thus observations are limited. Both of these are fantastic examples of the efforts made in trying to solve this problem which we have learnt has profound effects on attribution results. Yes, the “Weather Rescue” is only limited to Western Europe, but I hope it inspires hundreds of future projects.


Comment if you know of any other similar projects!

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