High Impact Weather Events in Eurasia: Selected, Simulated and Storified

Based on surveys, extreme summer events with large societal impacts, like droughts and floods, will be selected from the recent past for China, India and Europe. Similar events will be identified in large ensembles of global climate simulations. The size of the ensembles allows an analysis of the inter-regional linkages between the Arctic, the Midlatitudes and the Indian Monsoon region through large-scale Rossby waves and other meteorological factors leading to the extreme, like soil-moisture and sea-surface temperature conditions. In addition, a one in a thousand year event in China, India and Europe, although not witnessed in the recent past, will be analysed. The predictability of the event, weeks to months in advance will be assessed through additional simulations. Using empirical methods and process-based models, the impact on crop yields and economy will be estimated as well as the number of premature deaths. Using large ensembles under projected 2050 conditions the effect of climate change on these extremes and their impacts will be analysed. This research material is translated into powerful stories about concrete events that illustrate how climate affects man, man affects climate, how different geographical regions are connected and how extreme the weather might get. The meteorological data of these events will be made available for further impact studies.