Computation of extreme heat waves in climate models using a large deviation algorithm

Ragone, F., Wouters, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5418-7657 and Bouchet, F. (2018) Computation of extreme heat waves in climate models using a large deviation algorithm. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115 (1). pp. 24-29. ISSN 0027-8424 doi: 10.1073/pnas.1712645115

Abstract/Summary

Studying extreme events and how they evolve in a changing climate is one of the most important current scientific challenges. Starting from complex climate models, a key difficulty is to be able to run long enough simulations to observe those extremely rare events. In physics, chemistry, and biology, rare event algorithms have recently been developed to compute probabilities of events that cannot be observed in direct numerical simulations. Here we propose such an algorithm, specifically designed for extreme heat or cold waves, based on statistical physics. This approach gives an improvement of more than two orders of magnitude in the sampling efficiency. We describe the dynamics of events that would not be observed otherwise. We show that European extreme heat waves are related to a global teleconnection pattern involving North America and Asia. This tool opens up a wide range of possible studies to quantitatively assess the impact of climate change.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/81413
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Publisher	National Academy of Sciences
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