HR: 14:25h
AN: GC13B-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Severe Extra-tropical Storms Under Climate Change And Related Impacts
AU: * Leckebusch, G C
EM: gcl@met.fu-berlin.de
AF: Freie Universität Berlin Institute for Meteorology, Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg 6-10, Berlin, 12165, Germany
AU: Ulbrich, U
EM: uwe.ulbrich@met.fu-berlin.de
AF: Freie Universität Berlin Institute for Meteorology, Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg 6-10, Berlin, 12165, Germany
AU: Pinto, J G
EM: jpinto@meteo.uni-koeln.de
AF: University of Cologne Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology, Kerpener Str.13, Cologne, 50937, Germany
AU: Donat, M
EM: markus.donat@met.fu-berlin.de
AF: Freie Universität Berlin Institute for Meteorology, Carl-Heinrich-Becker-Weg 6-10, Berlin, 12165, Germany
AB: Winter storms caused by extra-tropical cyclones over the Northeast Pacific and the Northeast Atlantic basins are important factors for property losses caused by natural hazards over Europe and North-America. The European storm series in early 1990 and late 1999 led to enormous economic damages (US-$14.2 bn and $18.5 bn, respectively) and insured claims (US-$9.8 bn and $10.75 bn, respectively). Although significant trends in North Atlantic / European storm activity have not been identified for the last decades, this study provide evidence that under anthropogenic climate change the number of extreme storms could increase, whereas the total number of northern hemispheric extra-tropical cyclones may be slightly reduced. This holds true for the Northeast Pacific as well as the Northeast Atlantic basin. The results from global climate models are well recognised in wind speed analyses from regional climate models. For parts of western Central Europe an increase in frequency and intensity of extreme wind speeds are identified. In this context, the analysis of climate models from the ENSEMBLES initiative offers the unique opportunity to investigate model to model variability for GCM and RCM simulation in more horizontal detail, leading thus to measures of uncertainty. Additionally, loss potentials derived from an ensemble of global and regional climate models using a simple storm damage regression model under climate change conditions are presented. For the two European regions (United Kingdom and Germany) ensemble-mean storm-related losses are investigated. Based on GCMs the ensemble mean is found to possibly increase by up to 37%. Furthermore, the interannual variability of extreme events will increase leading to a higher risk of extreme storm activity and related losses. In order to gain more regional information, RCMs have been forced with ECMWF-ERA40 for validation, and with several GCMs under IPCC SRES scenarios for future conditions.
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
DE: 1807 Climate impacts
DE: 1817 Extreme events
DE: 3305 Climate change and variability (1616, 1635, 3309, 4215, 4513)
SC: Global Environmental Change [GC]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting