| Session Description |
The construction of scenarios of climate variability and extremes is one of the major challenges facing the research community, as it has been recognized that changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events are likely to have more substantial and widespread impacts on the environment and human activities than changes in the mean climate. Extremes -by definition- are of very low temporal frequency, and very often occur at very high spatial resolution. Hence, many of the extreme weather events which are of importance to the vulnerability, impacts and adaptation community, such as extreme precipitations, require much higher temporal and spatial resolution information than is currently available from the climate scenarios research community. Suitable regionalisation or downscaling techniques may be able to overcome some of the GCM limitations to better simulate the extremes and their frequencies of occurrence. The objectives of this session are therefore to provide a forum for exchange of the latest developments and applications of statistical and dynamical downscaling methods for the construction of reliable high-resolution scenarios of climate extremes and climate variability. Proposed presentations can deal with the general topic of downscaling tools used in hydrology and atmospheric sciences, and more generally in climate change research. |
