Weather Climate Interactions and Extreme Events in the Climate System

Abstract:

The most pronounced local impacts of climate change would occur in association with extreme weather events superimposed on the altered climate. Thus a major thrust of recent efforts in the climate community has been to assess how extreme regional events such as cold air outbreaks, heat waves, tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, and severe weather might change with the climate. Many of these types of events are poorly simulated in climate models because of insufficient spatial resolution and insufficient quality parameterization of sub grid scale convection and radiation processes. This talk summarizes examples selected from those discussed below of how weather and climate events can be interconnected so that the physics of natural climate and weather phenomena depend on each other, thereby complicating our ability to simulate extreme events. A major focus of the chapter is on the Madden Julian oscillation (MJO), which is associated with alternating eastward-moving planetary scale regions of enhanced and suppressed moist deep convection favoring warm pool regions in the tropics. The MJO modulates weather events around the world and influences the evolution of interannual climate variability. We first discuss how the MJO evolves together with the seasonal cycle, the El Niño/southern oscillation (ENSO), and the extratropical circulation, then continue with a case study illustration of how El Niño is intrinsically coupled to intraseasonal and synoptic weather events such as the MJO and westerly wind bursts. This interconnectedness in the system implies that modeling many types of regional extreme weather events requires more than simply downscaling coarse climate model signals to nested regional models because extreme outcomes in a region can depend on poorly simulated extreme weather in distant parts of the world.

The authors hope that an improved understanding of these types of interactions between signals across scales of time and space will ultimately yield conversation about how to better simulate these signals in climate models to yield better understanding and more informed prediction of the broader climate system and regional climate change.