Climate change and related impact

A broad accumulation of evidence, including that from global-scale detection and attribution  studies resulted in the strong conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC AR4) that most of the warming observed over the last 50  years is attributable to human activities. Some recent studies have begun to assess whether the  climate response to external forcing is detectable on regional scales. In addition, other studies  are now evaluating the prospects of detecting externally forced change in oceanic variables  despite the scarcity of the observed datasets. The current assessments of potential impacts of  climate change are still deficient in terms of regional details, extreme events distribution as well  as in terms of characterisation of uncertainty associated to them.

All these developments are important, because ultimately, policy makers will be strongly  influenced by evidence of impacts in regions that are of direct interest to them, and by evidence  that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are having an influence on the occurrence of high  impact climate events such as heat waves and flooding.

This project aims to address these various questions by using state-of-the-art climate models  of various high-resolution, new downscaling strategies and improved statistical algorithms  (detection and attribution techniques, changes in extreme event distribution ...).