Heat waves. Drought. Destructive wildfires. Record-breaking hurricanes. Torrential Rains. Devastating floods. Unprecedented snowfall. Every one of these forces of nature has graced recent headlines as the incidence and severity of extreme weather events increase.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a coincidence. The impacts have been felt on a massive scale. And they are primarily and directly influenced by climate change.
Formed in 2015, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) leans on advances in attribution science to study the causes of increasingly severe weather events and their relationship to climate change by attempting to answer the difficult questions often posed in the aftermath of such extreme events.
The results of weather data collection and modeling, often performed during or just after an extreme event, are made public to support discussions on causes and risk reduction for the future.
Extreme weather events devastate society, including our most vulnerable populations, resulting in loss of property, crops, prosperity, and even life. Understanding and analyzing the role of climate change and the science behind “extreme event attribution” is still evolving as an essential piece of the puzzle.
While weather attribution is a relatively new science, great strides have already been made toward understanding the effect of climate change on the intensity and likelihood of an event, how much climate change contributed, and how extreme weather events occurring in different regions of the world are influenced unequally.
