CHEX: Climate Hazards and Extremes
To provide policy-relevant information through improved projections of climate hazards and extremes, by integrating long-term time series from proxy records with numerical model output and Earth observation data.
Objectives
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Improved methods for producing datasets of climatic variables relevant for impact and risk modelling, including methods for estimating likelihoods of compound events.
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National estimates on changes in coastal flooding, and projections of wind and wave extremes.
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Improved scenarios for future changes in fluvial flood risk, through additional field work following up the work in HordaFlom.
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New educational opportunities and basic research on detection, estimation and simulation of extreme events and climatic hazards, as well as on the likelihood and impacts of compound events, including funding for annual CHESS workshop/seminar.
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Improved understanding of the impacts of global climate change on the cryosphere, e.g. consequences of changes in the hydroclimate at Svalbard and melting glaciers in Scandinavia.
Project Summary
Climate hazards is a theme of growing importance, and it draws interest not only from the science community but also from policy-makers, industrial and financial actors, and local governments. We propose to bring together the BCCR’s expertise on climate-related geohazards, sea-level change, and extreme weather events, to conduct innovative research. We envision this synergetic project as an important conduit for the new BCCR Research Theme on climate hazards.
The backbone of any impact and risk modelling approach is an in-depth knowledge of today’s climate and its historical variability on relevant timescales. For some climate hazards, and in some geographical regions, coarse-scale re-analyses, observational climatologies, or proxy data may be the only sources of information. Furthermore, studying extreme events usually requires assumptions of stationarity, as well as extrapolation of short time series. Thus, analyses of climatic hazards might involve different approaches depending on the available information.
