Angry weather: Changing public discourse and meteorological services for extreme weather attribution

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) project, founded in 2014, has significantly advanced the science of attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic climate change. This has increased media attention and changed public understanding of changes in the weather and climate.

 

Issue

While methods to attribute extreme weather to climate change have existed for decades, the WWA project has dramatically reduced the timescale over which attribution is completed.

 

Approach

WWA has been hosted at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute since its inception in 2014. Together with colleagues at the UK Met Office, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Princeton and several other organisations, researchers at Oxford have developed a method to identify the role of anthropogenic climate change in the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events in real-time.

The WWA methodology entails risk-based probabilistic event attribution. The basic idea is to simulate possible weather in the present climate (with anthropogenic climate change) and possible weather under preindustrial climatic conditions, and compare the probability of the extreme event occurring in both worlds.

 

Impact

Since 2014, the team have seen media interest in their work rise sharply. Articles covering the research have been published worldwide, appearing in outlets spanning the entire political spectrum. Multiple sources indicate that the increased media interest in the research has enabled a qualitative change in public understanding of the relationship between climate change and weather events. The environment editor of The Guardian explains that the science of real-time attribution provides a numerical answer to the question of whether climate change caused a specific weather event.

The research has influenced and reinforced the actions of political actors in Germany, for example the media prominence influenced the Heat Action Plan, in which Germany’s Green Party calls for action and financial support to provide better information about heatwave risks to citizens.

The increased understanding of the relationship between extreme weather and anthropogenic climate change has placed new demands on meteorological services in European countries. In addition to predicting the weather, they are also increasingly expected to explain to the government, business, the media and the public if weather events are linked to climate change.

Climate and Environmental Advice of the German Weather Service collaborated with the WWA team on a project called ‘Prototype Extreme Events and Attribution Service’. The project is anticipated to develop into an attribution service for national weather services in Europe, public bodies concerned with climate change impacts, commercial entities, and outreach to the general public.

More information

• Read the full impact case study in the REF21 database

Institution: University of Oxford

Researcher: Professor Friederike Otto