November 5, 2015 The report, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 From a Climate Perspective," can be viewed online. (Credit: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) Human activities, such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use, influenced specific extreme weather and climate events in 2014, including tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, heavy rainfall in Europe, drought in East Africa, and stifling heat waves in Australia, Asia, and South America, according to a new report released today. The report, “Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective” published by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, addresses the natural and human causes of individual extreme events from around the world in 2014, including Antarctica. NOAA scientists served as three of the five lead editors on the report. "For each of the past four years, this report has demonstrated that individual events, like temperature extremes, have often been shown to be linked to additional atmospheric greenhouse gases caused by human activities, while other extremes, such as those that are precipitation related, are less likely to be convincingly linked to human activities,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “As the science of event attribution continues to advance, so too will our ability to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events. Until this is fully realized, communities would be well-served to look beyond the range of past extreme events to guide future resiliency efforts." Location and type of events analyzed in Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Prospective.. (Credit: BAMS) In this year’s report, 32 groups of scientists from around the world investigate 28 individual extreme events in 2014 and break out various factors that led to the extreme events, including the degree to which natural variability and human-induced climate change played a role. When human influence for an event cannot be conclusively identified with the scientific tools available today, this means that if there is a human contribution, it cannot be distinguished from natural climate variability. The report this year added analysis on new types of events including wildfires and Antarctic sea ice extent, and in one case looked at how land use patterns may influence the impacts and severity from precipitation. A long exposure image shows the El Portal Fire burning near Yosemite National Park, California in late July 2014. On the morning of July 28, the fire had burned more than 2,500 acres and was just five percent contained. More than 400 firefighters and several helicopters battled the flames. (Credit: Stuart Palley, EPA) Key findings for each of the assessed events include: North America: Around the World: South America Europe Middle East and Africa Asia Australia Antarctica “Understanding our influence on specific extreme weather events is ground-breaking science that will help us adapt to climate change,” said Stephanie C. Herring, Ph.D., lead editor for the report at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “As the field of climate attribution science grows, resource managers, the insurance industry, and many others can use the information more effectively for improved decision making and to help communities better prepare for future extreme events.” The report was edited by Herring, along with Martin P. Hoerling, NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory; James Kossin, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information; Thomas Peterson, World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology and formerly with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information; and Peter A. Stott, UK Met Office Hadley Centre. The report includes a global authorship from 21 countries. View the full report online. "AMS is pleased to collaborate with NOAA on providing the public with an accessible, peer-reviewed basis for understanding our changing world," said AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter. "Between the State of the Climate report earlier this year and now this annual Explaining Extremes collection, an ever clearer picture emerges of our advancing scientific capabilities to identify how climate change is affecting us." NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and our other social media channels.
The fifth annual NOAA report of extreme weather events in 2014 aims to analyse whether human-induced activity was a significant cause of or contributor to the events. The report concluded that human-caused climate change increased the severity of a number of the major weather events (Californian wildfires, Argentine heatwave and East African drought, amongst others), but that it was not the root cause of all of them (cold winters in the US Mid-West, extreme rainfall in the UK, record year in Antarctica ice flows).