about clew

The departmental focus on Climate and Extreme Weather (CLEW) seeks to:

Understand and predict the physical and statistical behavior of extreme weather and climate events.

CLEW objectives can be sub-divided into:

• monitoring, detection, and prediction
  • new observations
  • statistical techniques
• dynamics of the phenomena that lead to extreme events
• transmission of global climate forcing to daily and local scale weather and extremes, as well as the reverse transmission from the local scale back to the climate scale

Relevence

In the popular and even scientific media, weather “extremes” are ubiquitous. Determining how deserved this somewhat prized classification is one CLEW objective. Another is attribution: A common speculation is that the extremes can be attributed simply to the El Niño phenomenon, which is a leading mode of climate variability. There is a now recognition by the atmospheric science community that the links between weather and climate variability/change must be better understood.

As evidence, we note that the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) has the broad theme of "Bridging the Studies of Weather and Climate." A number of sessions are planned with the purpose of strengthening the links between studies of weather and climate. The specific themes include:

Linking Weather and Climate

Climate and Extreme Weather Events

Detection and Attribution of Regional Climate Change

Some CLEW researchers who will take advantage of the AMS opportunity are:

Agee: Large eddy simulation of coherent structures in cold air outbreaks. 19th Conference on Climate Variability and Change.

Gluhovsky: Reliable statistical inference for weather and climate. 19th Conference on Climate Variability and Change.

Baldwin: Object-oriented analysis of precipitation systems in NCEP Stage II analyses. AMS 5th Conference on Artificial Intelligence applications to Environmental Science

Diffenbaugh: Fine-scale processes regulate the response of extreme events to global climate change. AMS Forum: Climate Change Manifested by Changes in Weather

Trapp: Severe convective storms in past and future climates using a scale-spanning, multiple-model approach. AMS Forum: Climate Change Manifested by Changes in Weather