There is growing awareness that climate change cannot solely be considered as a “mean state modification. The impacts of climate change are closely tied to regional and local conditions. Changes in the characteristics, frequency, and severity of extreme weather events are amongst the most significant aspects of climate change. To understand and predict such events, which are typically responsible for the most disastrous climate impacts, is of paramount importance. Not all extremes lead to high impacts. However, high impact events are conditioned based on the exposure and vulnerability of particular regions or locations. Different types of extremes, e.g. droughts and extreme precipitation, might be associated with different regions.

This Collaborative Programme examines how high impact events work, how they can be simulated accurately in numerical models and how we might be able to project future changes reliably, highlighting the important regional differences regarding their impacts. As such, high resolution climate and impact modelling as well as downscaling with different methodologies are among the key issues. The CP further focuses on climate risk analysis, vulnerability and adaptation.

We work based on a list of science topics. The science topics can be adjusted and allow flexible participation of ECRA and non-ECRA partners. The general strategy starts from fundamental physical concepts, continues via process understanding and goes towards the best possible numerical simulations of the global and regional changes of extreme events, including composition-climate interactions, feedback and impacts.