Attributing extreme events to climate change: A new frontier in a warming world

The emerging field of extreme-event attribution (EEA) seeks to answer the question: "Has climate change influenced the frequency, likelihood, and/or severity of individual extreme events?" Methodological advances over the past 15 years have transformed what was once an unanswerable hypothetical into a tractable scientific question—and for certain types of extreme events, the influence of anthropogenic climate change has emerged beyond a reasonable doubt.

Several challenges remain, particularly those stemming from structural limitations in process-based climate models and the temporal and geographic limitations of historical observations. However, the growing use of large climate-model ensembles that capture natural climate variability, fine-scale simulations that better represent underlying physical processes, and the lengthening observational record could obviate some of these concerns in the near future.