event
Thursday 03 May 2018: U.S. precipitation extremes and flooding in GFDL climate models
Karin van der Wiel - KNMI
H170 11:00-12:00
Precipitation extremes have widespread negative impact on societies and ecosystems; it is therefore important to understand present and future patterns of extreme precipitation. I will present three studies related to extreme precipitation and flooding, all based on a family of newly developed GFDL coupled climate models.
First I present a systematic investigation of the quality of modelled extreme precipitation and its response to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations. I will show increasing horizontal model resolution significantly improves the representation of precipitation extremes and that the climate change response is sensitive to model resolution in these models. Then, I will focus on two applications of the higher resolution models for a climate change attribution of the flooding due to Hurricane Harvey (2017) and for an analysis of Mississippi river flooding.
