Come have lunch each week with young researchers from EPIC at this interdisciplinary lunch and learn series. This week will feature Raghav Pardasani & Yang Zhang.
Abstract:
Giorgio Sarro – How will extreme weather events change with global warming?
Abstract: A pressing societal question is to know how the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events will change with global warming. From physics and statistics, we can make educated guesses on how extreme weather events might change. However, to understand how extreme events will change, we need to understand what is causing extreme events today. In our current climate, extreme heat and precipitation usually happen during an atmospheric block. An atmospheric block happens when weather patterns get stuck in place for several days, creating extremely long-lasting rains in some areas and prolonged heatwaves in others. What is causing these “traffic jams” in the atmosphere then, and how will global warming mess with them? I will introduce how we predict atmospheric blocking currently, how we think the ingredients to create them will change and put to the test our hypothesis in a simple model. The result of the simple model surprised us!