Colloquium: Prof. Sonia I. Seneviratne
Wednesday, Sept 29, 2021, at 12.15 - 13.30
Room RZ F 21 or Online, Zoom | Sign up here
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Climate extreme and unprecedented weather events: Conclusions from the newest IPCC report
The first part of the 6th Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released on August 9, 2021. For the first time, a full chapter of the IPCC assessment report was dedicated to the topic of weather and climate extremes. The newest evidence shows that changes in extremes are observed in all regions of the world, and that human influence strongly contributed to observed trends. Some recent events would have been very unlikely to happen without human-induced climate change. With every increment of global warming, changes in extremes become larger, with important implications for changes in heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones depending on the region. All regions are projected to be affected by multiple changes in climate extremes and other climatic impact drivers with increasing global warming, in particular above 2°C of global warming. This also includes an increasing occurrence of unprecedented events as climate is moving further away from conditions ever experienced by human civilization.
About Prof. Sonia I. Seneviratne
Sonia I. Seneviratne is Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich. She has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and is listed among the Highy cited researchers of Web of science (Clarivate Analytics/Thomson Reuters). In her research, she investigates climate extremes (droughts, heatwaves), land-climate processes, and human-induced climate change, based on climate modelling and data analyses, including ground and satellite observations. Sonia Seneviratne has received several awards for her research, among others the Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2013) and a consolidator grant of the European Research Council (ERC, 2014-2019). Prof. Sonia Seneviratne was an author on several reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was recently a lead author of the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C global warming. Since 2018, she is a coordinating lead author of the 6th assessment report of the IPCC.
References
Seneviratne, S.I., X. Zhang, M. Adnan, W. Badi, C. Dereczynski, A. Di Luca, S. Ghosh, I. Iskandar, J. Kossin, S. Lewis, F. Otto, I. Pinto, M. Satoh, S.M. Vicente-Serrano, M. Wehner, and B. Zhou, in press: Chapter 11: Weather and Climate Extreme Events in a Changing Climate. In: IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
The presentation of the talk is available for protected page download.