1  Climate science 🚧

Learning objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

  • Understand why climate science is essential for risk assessment
  • Identify key climate science topics you should study for effective risk management
  • Navigate to appropriate resources for learning climate science fundamentals

1.1 Why climate science matters for risk assessment

Climate hazards don’t occur in isolation. A hurricane’s intensity depends on sea surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions. Droughts emerge from large-scale circulation patterns and ocean-atmosphere interactions. Floods reflect not just local rainfall but also broader weather systems and seasonal cycles.

Understanding these connections is crucial for risk assessment because climate science helps us answer three fundamental questions:

  1. What physical processes create hazardous weather patterns? Understanding the mechanisms behind hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and floods helps us identify when and where they’re most likely to occur.

  2. How do these patterns vary naturally over time? Climate systems exhibit variability on multiple timescales—from seasonal cycles to multi-decadal oscillations—that affect the frequency and intensity of extreme events.

  3. How might climate change alter these patterns? As greenhouse gas concentrations rise, the statistical properties of weather and climate are shifting, requiring us to account for non-stationarity in our risk assessments.

1.2 Essential climate science topics

  1. Climate models and modeling
  2. Multi-scale variability
  3. Specific weather patterns
  4. Climate change and sensitivity
  5. Hydrologic cycle

Further reading

  • Mudelsee (2020): statistical approaches to climate extremes
  • Merz et al. (2014): flood risk methods connecting climate to impacts
  • Ghil et al. (2011): physical processes and extreme value behavior