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Attribution

Is it climate change or just weather?

When an extreme-weather event occurs, people often ask: Is climate change to blame? For decades, climate scientists have answered that question in general terms: that as the planet warms, we can expect many such weather events to become more frequent and extreme.

But in recent years advances in attribution science have allowed researchers to answer the question in much greater detail.

Founded in 2015 by Dr Friederike Otto and the late Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) scientific partnership, which includes the Climate Centre, quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of a particular extreme-weather event; and it sometimes finds it has not.

To encourage actions that will make communities and countries more resilient to future extreme weather, WWA studies also evaluate how existing human vulnerability and exposure may have worsened the impacts of the event. The results are made public as soon as they are available, often weeks or even days after the event, to inform discussions about climate change and extreme weather.

Key links

Few aspects of Climate Centre work generate more interest from the international media than the attribution of the influence of climate on extreme events (from 2023 unless otherwise specified):

Radio France Internationale on the Madagascar heatwave
ABC News (US) and the drought in Iran, Iraq and Syria
Reuters and the drought in the Horn of Africa
Financial Times and the heatwaves in North America and Europe
Independent and the early-season heat in Asia
South China Morning Post on heat in China
New Zealand Herald on Cyclone Gabrielle

Extreme South Asia rainfall
Attribution study

Extreme South Asia rainfall

A June 2024 WWA study concluded that El Niño was the primary driver of extreme rainfall in April and May that caused widespread flash flooding across Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.

Rainfall in the area affected had become 25 per cent heavier in the last 40 years, but although they could not find definitive proof climate change was responsible, scientists said climate change was the “probable explanation”.

Read more

Partners

WWA is a partnership between experts from the Climate Centre, Imperial College London, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI), and the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement to conduct rapid attribution studies of extreme events.

The WWA network includes a wide range of scientists from around the world who join studies relevant to their geographic and thematic expertise.

WWA co-founder Dr Friederike ‘Fredi’ Otto is Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, one of Imperial College London’s six hubs for research, innovation and influence on global challenges.

KNMI’s Director (from February 2023) is Professor Maarten van Aalst, the former director of the Climate Centre; scientists Sarah Kew and Sjoukje Philip are WWA leads there.

Finally, Robert Vautard, the Director of Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace and newly appointed co-chair of the IPCC working group on the science of climate change for its seventh assessment of the global climate, rounds out the WWA core team (below, a group of WWA scientists meeting in Paris, June 2023).

 

World Weather Attribution FAQ

Science

The method used to conduct an attribution study consists of eight steps, described in detail in the scientific paper linked below. The first is to select and precisely define the extreme event to be studied, which provides a framework for the analysis.

Researchers determine the geographical boundaries of the most affected area, the best metrics to quantify the meteorological extreme such as maximum temperature and rainfall, and the duration of the event.

The Climate Centre’s role is chiefly to monitor potentially extreme events, with the advantage of insights gained from the Red Cross Red Crescent network in the field, helping to trigger studies using pre-established thresholds, then contributing to the definition of events and findings on vulnerability and exposure.

In 2020 the prestigious MIT Technology Review included WWA climate attribution as one of its ten “breakthrough technologies”, which matters because it provides “a clearer sense of how climate change is worsening the weather, and what we’ll need to do to prepare.”

(New York-based Roop Singh, pictured here, is the Climate Centre’s leading expert on attribution. Journalists can arrange interviews with her or her colleagues through media@climatecentre.org.)

How it’s done
Attribution study

Brazil floods

Climate change made the very extreme rainfall that caused destructive floods in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in late April and early May 2024 twice as likely, according to a rapid study from World Weather Attribution.

The heavy rains were also intensified by a fading El Niño phenomenon, while the impacts were made worse by some failures of infrastructure.

The event was “extremely rare” even with global warming – expected no more than once a century – but would have been more rare still without climate change.

Read the study
Brazil floods
Video

Understanding climate change and extreme weather

In this production, Fredi explains the thinking behind World Weather Attribution, which she leads and which now aims to complete around 20 studies a year. The planet is already outside the range of weather to which people are adapted to, and this is having very significant impacts, and not just in the global South, she says. The studies are done relatively quickly, Fredi explains, so that the scientists’ evidence can contribute to public discussion of events soon after they occur.

Information for the media