Extreme weather meteorologist how to#

They concluded that decision-makers would do well to prepare for new record-breaking inundations “in the next few years.” They were vindicated when their warnings came to pass in the early months of 2020.” “In the case of floods, the group found a 34% chance each winter that rainfall records would be broken in at least one of four broad regions of Britain. Doing so, they have generated a range of virtual winters, including extreme events that can happen in the future. One is the approach used by Dr Erich Fischer at eth Zurich, which he demonstrated during last year’s annual jamboree of the European Geosciences Union, how the heatwave that destroyed Lytton could have been foreseen with data available at the time.Īnother is from Britain’s Met Office, unseen (Unprecedented Simulation of Extremes with Ensembles), which was first used by Dr Vikki Thompson and her colleagues at the Met Office to try to understand the 2014 catastrophic floods in Southern England and Wales that resulted in $743m) of insurance claims, and try to predict the next big event.ĭr Thomson and her colleagues simulated the British winters between a certain period a thousand times, with each simulation adding a few perturbations – a small amount of heating in the atmosphere, for example.

Extreme weather meteorologist how to#

How to Predict (2023) explains the method used to predict the occurrence of rare and unprecedented, rare events. For instance, one-in-a-century floods or droughts can happen once every decade.Īccording to The Economist’s “How to predict record-shattering weather events,” this shift in weather patterns, particularly the occurrence of rare weather events, had inspired modellers to look closer to the tails of the frequency distributions of meteorological possibility that their models generate to look for these unprecedented extremes (How to Predict, 2023).

Floods and storms were the most prevalent events, the report says.Īs the world becomes hotter, phenomenal weather events that are considered rare will become more common. The number of major floods has doubled from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034 in the last two decades. The report, Human Cost of Disasters, published in 2020, shows 3,656 climate-related events between 19 and 6,681 climate-related disasters from 2000-2019, showing a sharp increase in numbers. The UNDRR report shows a staggering increase in extreme events in the last 20 years.