An overview of extreme event attribution

Music City Center 

Extreme event attribution refers to analyses of extreme climate events that attempt to relate such events to long-term changes in earth's climate in which greenhouse gas emissions play a large role. The statistical methods used for these attributions include a combination of extreme value theory to assess the probabilities of extreme events under a variety of climate scenarios, combined with analyses that relate observational data to climate model outputs. In this talk, we shall review these techniques and discuss applications to several recent extreme climate events, including the heatwave in the Pacific northwest in 2021 and the wildfires that it the Los Angeles area at the beginning of this year.