Scientific Computing and Numerics (SCAN) Seminar
As greenhouse gas concentrations increase and the world warms, not only temperature but also precipitation is changing. Governments, and more recently courts and businesses, are demanding information about what impacts they will face in the coming years and decades. Providing this information is challenging for any aspect of future climate because of the diverse sources of uncertainty – including natural variability, structural differences among climate models and their projections, and the range of trajectories society might choose to follow. Precipitation varies strongly in space and time, integrates over many physical processes unfolding at many different scales, and is highly non-gaussian. In this talk I will discuss my work to advance our understanding of changes in precipitation, using climate models as well as observations and developing new approaches to quantify precipitation change, along the way rethinking what we mean by precipitation variability and its extremes.