[Grad-postdoc-assn] ASP seminar Friday - Greg Holland
Brian Tang
btang at ucar.edu
Mon Apr 2 15:05:29 MDT 2012
Friday, April 6 @ 11 am
FL2-1022
Lunch with postdocs will follow the seminar in FL2-1002.
Greg Holland
NCAR/NESL/MMM
Climate Impacts on Weather Extremes: Variability and Change; Hurricanes
to Droughts
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 I examine the difficulties of differentiating
climate change from variability and the question of when observable
human-induced climate change commenced, together with the use of extreme
value theory to objectively assess the intensity and frequency of
extreme events. 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. Finally the potential of climate
change contributions to current high-impact weather events will be assessed.
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Brian Hong-An Tang
Postdoctoral Fellow
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Mesoscale & Microscale Meteorology Division
Foothills Lab 3 - Rm. 3075
Office: 303-497-8140
Cell: 339-203-1503
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