[Stoch] AGU Session on Understanding and Modeling Regional Climate Extremes

[Cecile Penland]

Prashant Sardeshmukh, Gil Compo and Cécile Penland announce a session to be
held at the Fall 2011 Meeting of the American Geophysical
Union in San Francisco (5-9 December) entitled

“GC35: Climate Extremes 2. Challenges in Understanding and Modeling Regional Climate
Extremes”

Abstracts may be submitted through the AGU website:
http://sites.agu.org/fallmeeting/

Description:

There are large uncertainties in how 21st century global warming will affect the statistics of
extreme weather, such as heat waves, cold snaps, droughts, floods and hurricanes. Indeed,
uneven data quality and inadequate sample sizes combine with climate model errors to create
uncertainty in such statistics even over the past century. These difficulties are magnified on
regional scales directly relevant to society. Because daily weather is not Gaussian, it is unclear
whether it is best to estimate changes in its extremes using changes in sample moments,
Generalized Extreme Value distributions fitted directly to small samples of extreme values, or
other methods. We invite contributions on all aspects of this important topic.