Sensitivity of Recent Event Attribution Analyses to Methodology

Abstract:

Since the issue concerning 2011, the annual "State of the Climate Report" published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Agency has included a supplement consisting of studies of the context of major extreme weather events within ongoing anthropogenic climate change. There are now a few dozen of these events examined within these supplements, but these studies have all differed in their input data sources as well as their approaches to defining the events, analysing the events, and considering the role of anthropogenic emissions. Here we re-examine most of these events (limited by feasibility) using a single analytical approach and the same experiment data source. We compare results from our analyses to those reported in the BAMS supplements collectively, with the aim of characterising the degree to which the lack of a common methodological framework may or may not influence overall conclusions.