Description:

Physical Climate Storylines – history and recent innovations

Jana Sillmann

Storylines have long been used in the climate science community in the context of scenarios (future pathways of emissions or socio-economic developments). More recently the term storyline has also been used to describe plausible trajectories of weather and climate conditions or events that are often associated with high societal impacts (either observed or anticipated). New methodologies in regional climate modeling have been developed to support physical storyline approaches for constructing and communicating more impact- and risk-relevant climate information tailored to regions and stakeholders. Physical storyline approaches are usually built on multiple lines of evidence for exploring uncertainties related to natural climate variability, and for embedding climate information into a given user context complementing probabilistic approaches. Physical climate storylines have further shown as useful in the context of physically plausible, but low-likelihood, high-impact outcomes. This presentation gives an overview of physical storyline approaches as assessed in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Prof. Dr. Jana Sillmann, Research Unit for Sustainability and Climate Risks, CEN, University of Hamburg, Germany

She is Professor for Climate Statistics and Climate Extremes at the University of Hamburg (Germany) and Senior Researcher at the Center for International Climate Research – Oslo (Norway). Her work focuses on relating physical aspects of weather and climate extremes to socio-economic impacts and questions related to risk assessment and decision-making. She is co-chairing the Knowledge Action Network on Emergent Risks and Extreme Events (Risk KAN) and represents the Risk KAN as member of the Future Earth General Assembly. She previously was co-leading activities of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) Grand Challenge on Weather and Climate Extremes and was a member of the scientific steering committee of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) Programme. She is also Lead Author of Chapter 12 “Climate change information for regional impact and for risk assessment” in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) Working Group 1.