There is considerable interest in being able to assess the extent to which recent extreme weather events can be linked to anthropogenic climate change. As a result, a number of groups around the world are producing near real-time attribution analyses. But are current generation climate models up to the job? I will argue that they are not - as manifest by the unreliability of monthly and seasonal forecasts. The importance of such reliability diagnostics has been misunderstood in the climate attribution community. I will try to show with an explicit but idealised example why information about monthly/seasonal forecast reliability must be considered central to the question of building climate models that can not only attribute real-time weather events, but can also provide society with reliable information to adapt to climate change. I will discuss some ideas on why current generation climate models are deficient and what we should do to improve them.

This event is part of the eventgroup Meteorology Colloquium Karlsruhe

Speaker
Prof. Tim Palmer

Prof. für Physik des Klimas in Oxford u. Fellow des Jesus College
Abteilungsleiter u Sen. Scientist Europ. Centre for Med.Range Weather Forecasts in Reading

Organizer
IMK-TRO
Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research
KIT
Wolfgang-Gaede-Str. 1
76131 Karlsruhe
Tel: 0721 608 43356
Mail: imk-tro ∂does-not-exist.kit edu
https://www.imk-tro.kit.edu