High Impact Weather Events in Eurasia: Selected, Simulated and Storified

HIWAVES3 facilitates a dialogue between climate modelers, impact modelers and partners in different geographical regions with knowledge of local societal relevant meteorological events to construct stories of selected high-impact extreme events, simulated for present-day and future climate conditions. The story includes the origin of the extreme event from a meteorological perspective, its inter-regional linkages, its predictability, its societal impact and how climate change affects its magnitude and probability. Such stories, made available for schools, the general public and governments, are effective communication means, more so than bare numbers about the expected mean temperature increase, precipitation changes in percentages and such. Based on surveys, extreme summer events with large societal impacts, like droughts and floods, will be selected from the recent past for China, India and Europe. Similar events will be identified in large ensembles of global climate simulations. The size of the ensembles allows an analysis of the inter-regional linkages between the Arctic, the Midlatitudes and the Indian Monsoon region through large-scale Rossby waves and other meteorological factors leading to the extreme, like soil-moisture and sea-surface temperature conditions. In addition, a one in a thousand year event in China, India and Europe, although not witnessed in the recent past, will be analysed. The predictability of the event, weeks to months in advance will be assessed through additional simulations. Using empirical methods and process-based models, the impact on crop yields and economy will be estimated as well as the number of premature deaths. Using large ensembles under projected 2050 conditions the effect of climate change on these extremes and their impacts will be analysed. This research material is translated into powerful stories about concrete events that illustrate how climate affects man, man affects climate, how different geographical regions are connected and how extreme the weather might get. The meteorological data of these events will be made available for further impact studies.

An essential part of HIWAVES3 is to create powerful stories about selected high-impact extreme events in the regions of interest covered by the partners in the consortium, namely in China, Europe and India. The stories include the origin of the extreme event from a meteorological perspective, its inter-regional linkages, its predictability, its societal impact and how climate change affects its magnitude and probability. We believe that such stories, made available for schools, the general public and governments, are effective communication means, more so than bare numbers about the expected mean temperature increase, precipitation changes in % and such. The scientific knowledge about the high impact extremes will also be communicated to the scientific community through peer-reviewed papers and presentations at conferences. KNMI advices the Dutch government on matters regarding climate change and extreme weather conditions. Results from HIWAVES3 will directly feed into these activities. Digital Explorer will take part in HIWAVES3 to help create the stories and provide tools and templates for the communication of the results to the general public and schools. The communication will be tailored to the culture and national circumstances of the partners. To engage climate data users in HIWAVES3 we plan a survey about high-impact extremes. This survey will contain first examples of real-world and simulated high-impact events and we will ask for feedback on the communication of these results and try to find out what we should do in the second part of the project to better serve the needs of the users that we will identify. Climate data users from the survey will be invited to the mid-term and end-of-term meetings for exchange of knowledge and ideas. KNMI hosts a wealth of model data and real-world data. The datasets from HIWAVES3 will be made available through the KNMI servers using standard protocols.