The WCRP Special Issue of Weather and Climate Extremes Journal, Vol. 9, has now been published (and is free to download). This highlights the work of the WCRP Grand Challenge on Climate Extremes as well as the WCRP-ICTP Summer School on Attribution and Prediction of Extreme Events.
"Understanding our planet׳s climate – not just warmth of air near the surface but the vast complicated and interacting physical, ecological and social factors that control and modify exchanges of heat, water and carbon among atmosphere, land, ocean and ice – to such a degree that one can make skillful predictions of future climate: this represents a scientific, technical and creative challenge equal to any confronting humanity. For the task ahead – and we must admit that, even building on three or four decades of extraordinary advances in research and particularly modeling, much of the task lies still ahead – climate science needs to attract and retain the best, brightest and most diverse students. For the foreseeable future, driven mostly by persistent inability of our fastest computers to run fully coupled full height full depth high resolution interactive biogeochemical climate models in ensemble mode (and not to mention the lack of full-coverage data by which to validate those models), those students will calculate and explore and compare, in detail and with exquisite care, monthly means, meridional heat transports, zonal wind patterns and global nutrient budgets – the large-scale but often subtle diagnostic patterns of our planet..." read the article