| Session Details | |
| Section | AS - Atmospheric Sciences |
| Session Title | Weather and Climate Hazards in Asia - Simulations, Predictions and Attributions |
| Main Convener | Dr. Chi-Yung Francis Tam (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR) Prof. Saji Hameed (The University of Aizu, Japan) |
| Co-convener(s) | |
| Session Description | Weather and climate extremes can cause huge losses both economically and in terms of human lives, and are of increasing concern to society. Addressing various issues related to extreme events is even more pressing under the global warming background, when the latter is likely to enhance the frequency and/or severity of some of these hazards. Over Asia where more than half of the world's population lives, coastal locations in the tropical monsoon area are particularly vulnerable to tropical cyclones, whereas torrential rain, heat waves, droughts, dust storms and wild fires are also natural hazards common in this region. Asia has also seen very rapid economic development in the past few decades. The accompanying urbanization, land use change and the rise/expansion of coastal mega-cities might exacerbate the impacts of weather extremes or create new types of hazards (such as severe air pollution). It is clear that there is an urgent need to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for, and the predictability of extreme weather and climate events. Numerical models are often employed to address most of these issues; the ability of these models in capturing extremes needs to be examined closely. With global warming taking place, one might also ask the (meaningful) question of to what extent the occurrence of a particular extreme event (such as the recent typhoon Haiyan) can be attributed to background climate change. In this session, we seek papers addressing one of the following issues: 1. Simulations of weather and climate extremes by global or regional models, including the role of model resolution and gridding, model dynamics, cloud physics and other physical parameterizations, impacts and feedbacks from the land surface component, incoporation of atmosphere-ocean-wave coupling, the possible role of aerosols and interactive chemistry module in extremes, and cases studies using numerical models; 2. Predictions of extreme events, including their predictability in numerical weather and climate models, dependence on model physics and configurations, sensitivity to initial state of the climate system and background climate, and the use of statistical and dynamical downscaling methods for forecasting occurrence of extremes; 3. Attribution of extremes, including the possibility of attributing specific events such as super typhoons, heat waves etc. to global warming, the use of large ensembles of integrations and other latest developments in attribution techniques. |