Extreme weather

A tornado is an example for an extreme weather event. This tornado struck Anadarko, Oklahoma during a tornado outbreak in 1999.

Extreme weather includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution—the range that has been seen in the past.[1][2] Extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history. They are defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent (10th or 90th percentile of a probability density function).[2] The main types of extreme weather include heat waves, cold waves and heavy precipitation or storm events, such as tropical cyclones. The effects of extreme weather events are economic costs, loss of human lives, droughts, floods, landslides. Severe weather is a particular type of extreme weather which poses risks to life and property.

Climate change is increasing the periodicity and intensity of some extreme weather events.[3] Confidence in the attribution of extreme weather and other events to anthropogenic climate change is highest in changes in frequency or magnitude of extreme heat and cold events with some confidence in increases in heavy precipitation and increases in the intensity of droughts.[4] Current evidence and climate models show that an increasing global temperature will intensify extreme weather events around the globe, thereby amplifying human loss, damages and economic costs, and ecosystem destruction.

Extreme weather has significant impacts on human society as well as natural ecosystems. For example, a global insurer Munich Re estimates that natural disasters cause more than $90 in billion global direct losses in 2015.[5] Some human activities can exacerbate the effects, for example poor urban planning, wetland destruction, and building homes along floodplains.

  1. ^ "Has Climate Variability, or have Climate Extremes, Changed?". Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Archived from the original on 2005-11-01. Retrieved 13 April 2007.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference :8 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Seneviratne, Sonia I.; Zhang, Xuebin; Adnan, M.; Badi, W.; et al. (2021). "Chapter 11: Weather and climate extreme events in a changing climate" (PDF). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate. Cambridge University Press. p. 1517.
  4. ^ Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (Report). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2016. pp. 127–136. doi:10.17226/21852. ISBN 978-0-309-38094-2. Archived from the original on 2022-02-15. Retrieved 2020-02-22.
  5. ^ Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change (Report). Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2016. pp. 21–24. doi:10.17226/21852. ISBN 978-0-309-38094-2.

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