freak weather; not so freaky

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 “unearthin...

This week I was super lucky to hear from Dr Friederike Otto and this post is entirely inspired by our discussion. Lead scientist on the international project   World Weather Attribution  (WWA) – Dr.Otto aims to speed up the analysis and communication of the impact climate change has on extreme weather events under a new science: Real Time Attribution . Dr Friederike Otto So isn’t this essentially EEA? – Indeed this science follows the same principles we discussed in EEA, but it just tries to do so far more rapidly. Dr.Otto then directed me to the incredible  overview of the real-time peer-reviewed studies they have already done , and I suggest you take 30 seconds to have a quick scroll (all open-access and on the website). She said that not all the listed studies were real-time, so to check out the European heat waves, floods in Paris, storm Desmond and the Kenyan and Somalian drought (…remember this from last week?) One thing we ...