A recent overview article by Jana Sillmann and colleagues summarizes challenges and opportunities for scientific progress on understanding, modeling and predicting weather and climate extremes. The paper is one of the outputs around the WCRP Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes (GC-Extremes): In late 2015, the GC-Extremes had held a workshop on "Understanding, modelling and predicting weather and climate extremes" (Oslo, Norway, 5-7 October 2015). The workshop organizers had collected and summarized insights from this event and complemented them with most recent literature in order to produce a comprehensive overview paper on the subject. Their resulting article was now published online in the journal "Weather and Climate Extremes".
The paper elaborates on the scientific challenges related to large-scale drivers and local-to-regional feedback processes leading to extreme events. A better understanding thereof is expected to improve the prediction of extremes as well as the evaluation of extremes in model simulations. The article lays out avenues to focus on short- vs. long-duration extreme events, their underlying mechanisms as well as approaches for evaluation and prediction.
The original workshop had been attended by around 40 international expert scientists and examined dynamical and physical processes, their representation in models as well as the development of statistical methods for model performance metrics.