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Workgroup on Climate-Statistical Mechanics – LSCE/SPEC
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Workgroup on Climate-Statistical Mechanics – LSCE/SPEC
Monday Jan 11th 2021, 13.00 London Time/14.00 Paris time, Seminar
Valerio Lucarini (University of Reading)
“Fingerprinting Heatwaves and Cold Spells and Assessing Their Response to Climate Change using Large Deviation Theory”
Extreme events provide relevant insights on the dynamics of the climate system and their understanding is key to defining useful strategies for mitigating the impact of climate variability and climate change. By applying large deviation theory to the output of a state-of-the-art climate model, we define the climatology of persistent heatwaves and cold spells in some key target regions of the planet by constructing empirically the corresponding rate functions for the surface temperature, and we assess the impact of increasing CO2 concentration on such persistent anomalies. In particular, we can better understand the increasing hazard associated to heatwaves in a warmer climate. We show that two 2010 high impact events – summer Russian heatwave and winter Dzud in Mongolia – are associated with atmospheric patterns that are exceptional compared to the typical ones, but typical compared to the climatology of extreme events. Finally, we propose an approximate formula for describing large and persistent temperature fluctuations from easily accessible statistical properties.
M. Galfi and V. Lucarini, Fingerprinting Heatwaves and Cold Spells and Assessing Their Response to Climate Change using Large Deviation Theory, arXiv:2010.08272 (2020) [submitted to Physical Review Letters]
V. M. Galfi, V. Lucarini, and J. Wouters, A large deviation theory-based analysis of heat waves and cold spells in a simplified model of the general circulation of the atmosphere, J. Stat. Mech. 033404 (2019)