Hi,

There's been a bunch of publications and news items about the project and our research in the last week - here's the rundown:

Blog by our science coordinator, Dr Friederike Otto, about our new World Weather Attribution project with Climate Central:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/10/attributing-extreme-weather-to-climate-change-in-realtime/

New publication in Climatic Change by Dr Otto and others on the team about extreme summer rainfall events in England and Wales:
http://www.climateprediction.net/new-publication-about-extreme-summer-rainfall-in-england-and-wales/

In the summer of 2007 England and Wales experienced very heavy flooding. Summer precipitation and subsequently flooding are harder to model than winter or autumn rainfall and this recent publication highlights this again. We look at different possible drivers of high precipitation in summer and do not find a conclusive signal apart for the July precipitation which might have been exacerbated due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the focus of the paper is not so much the attribution of the extreme precipitation to external climate drivers but the quantification of the uncertainties involved in such a study. The paper is part of a special issue dedicated to exactly these issues which will soon be published in full.

Article in the Independent about the new World Weather Attribution project:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/scientists-to-fasttrack-evidence-linking-global-warming-to-wild-weather-9773767.html

Article about our collaboration with Oregon State University on extreme weather event attribution in the Western USA:
http://www.dailybarometer.com/news/osu-fights-back-against-climate-change/article_90be613c-5299-11e4-a22e-0017a43b2370.html

Keep an eye on the Environmental Change Institute website to see Prof Myles Allen's lecture about human influence on the climte that he gave this morning:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/anthropocene/index.html

Don't forget you can keep up-to-date with all these sorts of things on our Twitter and Facebook pages:
https://twitter.com/CPDN_BOINC
https://www.facebook.com/climateprediction.net

Best wishes,
Hannah

---

Hannah Rowlands
--
No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

New publication on the experimental setup of weather@home
http://www.climateprediction.net/new-publication-on-the-experimental-setup-of-weatherhome/

A paper detailing the model development, experimental setup and validation of the weather@home project has been published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

The paper is open access and is available to read here:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2455/abstract

The paper explains the background to climateprediction.net and how the project is using regional climate modelling to answer questions about the attribution of extreme weather events � �Was the event caused by anthropogenic climate change?�

weather@home � development and validation of a very large ensemble modelling system for probabilistic event attribution

Neil Massey, Richard Jones, Friederike Otto, Tolu Aina, Simon Wilson, James Murphy, David Hassell, Hiro Yamazaki and Myles Allen

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, DOI: 10.1002/qj.2455

---

Hannah Rowlands
--
No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Europe�s Record Heat Directly Tied to Climate Change
http://www.climateprediction.net/europes-record-heat-directly-tied-to-climate-change/

Research from our weather@home experiments has contributed to results that link the recent record temperatures in Europe with human-caused climate change.

Our team at the University of Oxford, led by Myles Allen and Friederike Otto, used thousands of iterations of regional climate models embedded within larger global models to examine more localized weather events.

For example, our data for Germany determined that what was once a 1 in 80-year heat event has now become a 1 in 7-year event, making it 10 times more likely due to global warming.

Using our volunteers� computers for our weather@home project, we simulated possible European weather based on the observed global ocean temperatures. At the same time, we also simulated a 2014 where there is no human-influenced climate change. Comparing those two �worlds� we found that the 2014 European temperatures were much more likely in the world with climate change than the one without.

�It is important to highlight that Oxford�s result crucially depends on the 2014 global ocean temperatures. The same study using 2000-2011 conditions gives a different result although the anthropogenic warming is the roughly same in these years,� said Dr Friederike Otto.

�When looking at smaller regions in Europe, we notice that there is a higher variability of temperatures,� Karsten Haustein, who conducted the analysis, said. �For example, in central Europe we found that the probability of reaching the observed 2014 temperatures is about 40 times higher. In an even smaller region such as the UK, we found that the probability has increased by a factor of about 10.�

---

Hannah Rowlands
--
No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Given the project frequent use of FAR (Fractional attributable risk) there is an interesting paper by M. Fischer and R. Knutti

Anthropogenic contribution to globaloccurrence of heavy-precipitation and high-temperature extremes

Paper here

Abstract:

Climate change includes not only changes in mean climatebut also in weather extremes. For a few prominent heatwavesand heavy precipitation events a human contribution to theiroccurrence has been demonstrated1�5. Here we apply a similarframework but estimate what fraction of all globally occurringheavy precipitation and hot extremes is attributable towarming. We show that at the present-day warming of 0.85?Cabout 18% of the moderate daily precipitation extremes overland are attributable to the observed temperature increasesince pre-industrial times, which in turn primarily resultsfrom human influence6. For 2?C of warming the fraction ofprecipitation extremes attributable to human influence risesto about 40%. Likewise, today about 75% of the moderatedaily hot extremes over land are attributable to warming. Itis the most rare and extreme events for which the largestfraction is anthropogenic, and that contribution increasesnonlinearly with further warming. The approach introducedhere is robust owing to its global perspective, less sensitiveto model biases than alternative methods and informative formitigation policy, and thereby complementary to single-eventattribution. Combined with information on vulnerability andexposure, it serves as a scientific basis for assessment of globalrisk fromextremeweather, the discussionofmitigationtargets,and liability considerations.

---

Visit BOINC WIKI for help

And join BOINC Synergy for all the news in one place.