Advancing our understanding and modeling of climate extremes by combining physical insights with statistical methodology

The recent fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5) has once more shown that our climate is changing and with it its extremes. As the impacts of climate extremes (e.g., heat waves, floods, droughts, and wind stor ms) often lead to devastating consequences for society and the environment, reliable predictions of extremes on short and long time scales are needed to reduce their potential risks and damages. Understanding and predicting changes in climate extremes rem ains, however, one of the key challenges in climate research and thus has been selected as one of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Grand Challenges (see http://www.wcrp-climate.org/index.php/grand-challenges). This workshop will bring together n ational and international experts and young researchers from both the climate and statistical sciences (i.e., climate modeling and prediction, extreme events, climate diagnostics and analysis) with the goal of developing joint projects to address some of the scientific challenges as emphasized in the WCRP Grand Challenges on Climate Extremes white paper (Zhang et al. 2014). In particular, the workshop aims to address questions regarding: (i) the dynamical and physical processes (e.g., large-scale modes of variability, blocking anticyclones, land-atmosphere feedbacks, monsoons, etc.) that affect the occurrence and amplitude of weather and climate extremes, (ii) the representation of these processes in models, and (iii) the development of statistical method s and tools to incorporate this information into the evaluation of model performance and the prediction of climate extremes. The workshop participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their latest research related to these challenges and s ubstantial time will be spent to develop project ideas and to coordinate future research and the communication of results.