Our Attribution Science and Climate Fingerprints program uses statistical methods to quantify whether and to what extent human-caused climate change altered the likelihood of specific weather events.
Through attribution science, scientists are able to identify weather conditions that are becoming more common due to human-caused climate change. It emphasizes the urgent need to reduce carbon pollution in order to prevent climate-related impacts from growing worse.
Our team works with global partners to develop techniques that quantify climate fingerprints in daily weather and extreme events worldwide, and to communicate these linkages.
Resources
Heat event alerts: We identify, analyze, and track local and regional heat events around the world that are influenced by climate change.
Attribution analysis reports: We use the latest attribution science to analyze the influence of climate change on temperature trends and recent extreme weather events — both at a regional and global scale.
Partners
World Weather Attribution: We partner with this collective of scientists that conducts in-depth studies on attribution. Their work quantifies how climate change influences the intensity and likelihood of an extreme weather event, and how existing vulnerabilities worsened the impacts.
Yale Program on Climate Change Communications: We partner with this group of social scientists and integrate their research insights into our communication work. YPCCC conducts scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the underlying psychological, cultural, and political factors that influence them.
ASCMO
A multi-method framework for global real-time climate attribution (June 2022)
Human-driven climate change has caused a wide range of extreme weather events to become more frequent in recent decades. Although increased and intense periods of extreme weather are expected consequences of anthropogenic climate warming, it remains challenging to rapidly and continuously assess the degree to which human activity alters the probability of specific events. This study introduces a new framework to enable the production and communication of global real-time estimates of how human-driven climate change has changed the likelihood of daily weather events.
IOP Science
Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes (November 2024)
Understanding how rising global air and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) influence tropical cyclone intensities is crucial for assessing current and future storm risks. Using observations, climate models, and potential intensity theory, this study introduces a novel rapid attribution framework that quantifies the impact of historically-warming North Atlantic SSTs on observed hurricane maximum wind speeds.
American Meteorological Society
Human Fingerprints on Daily Temperatures in 2022
(July 2024)
The year 2022 was an exceptional year for heat worldwide. While human-induced climate change is no doubt responsible for the globally increasing rate and intensity of extreme heat, there is an ongoing need to investigate and communicate the extent of this human influence depending on time of year, region, and event persistence. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative has pioneered rapid attribution approaches to enable quantitative attribution of human influences on individual heat events, and regularly publishes detailed attribution reports using peer-reviewed methods. In this study, we use our automated real-time attribution system (Gilford et al. 2022) to expand on WWA’s capacity, producing a hindcast of daily attribution estimates in 2022. Also, using WWA reports for two events as a benchmark, we demonstrate the attributable scale and spatial–temporal scope of similarly defined events around the world in 2022.
IOP Science
Attributing daily ocean temperatures to anthropogenic climate change (May 2024)
Ocean temperatures are rising and hit record levels around the world in 2023. While trends are clear and likely strongly connected to human-caused climate change, the oceans also exhibit variability on the daily level, leading to local extremes such as marine heatwaves. We present an operational system to estimate the impact of human-caused climate change on daily sea surface temperatures anywhere in the ocean.
ASCMO
A multi-method framework for global real-time climate attribution (June 2022)
Human-driven climate change has caused a wide range of extreme weather events to become more frequent in recent decades. Although increased and intense periods of extreme weather are expected consequences of anthropogenic climate warming, it remains challenging to rapidly and continuously assess the degree to which human activity alters the probability of specific events. This study introduces a new framework to enable the production and communication of global real-time estimates of how human-driven climate change has changed the likelihood of daily weather events.
IOP Science
Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes (November 2024)
Understanding how rising global air and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) influence tropical cyclone intensities is crucial for assessing current and future storm risks. Using observations, climate models, and potential intensity theory, this study introduces a novel rapid attribution framework that quantifies the impact of historically-warming North Atlantic SSTs on observed hurricane maximum wind speeds.
American Meteorological Society
Human Fingerprints on Daily Temperatures in 2022
(July 2024)
The year 2022 was an exceptional year for heat worldwide. While human-induced climate change is no doubt responsible for the globally increasing rate and intensity of extreme heat, there is an ongoing need to investigate and communicate the extent of this human influence depending on time of year, region, and event persistence. The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative has pioneered rapid attribution approaches to enable quantitative attribution of human influences on individual heat events, and regularly publishes detailed attribution reports using peer-reviewed methods. In this study, we use our automated real-time attribution system (Gilford et al. 2022) to expand on WWA’s capacity, producing a hindcast of daily attribution estimates in 2022. Also, using WWA reports for two events as a benchmark, we demonstrate the attributable scale and spatial–temporal scope of similarly defined events around the world in 2022.
IOP Science
Attributing daily ocean temperatures to anthropogenic climate change (May 2024)
Ocean temperatures are rising and hit record levels around the world in 2023. While trends are clear and likely strongly connected to human-caused climate change, the oceans also exhibit variability on the daily level, leading to local extremes such as marine heatwaves. We present an operational system to estimate the impact of human-caused climate change on daily sea surface temperatures anywhere in the ocean.
ASCMO
A multi-method framework for global real-time climate attribution (June 2022)
Human-driven climate change has caused a wide range of extreme weather events to become more frequent in recent decades. Although increased and intense periods of extreme weather are expected consequences of anthropogenic climate warming, it remains challenging to rapidly and continuously assess the degree to which human activity alters the probability of specific events. This study introduces a new framework to enable the production and communication of global real-time estimates of how human-driven climate change has changed the likelihood of daily weather events.
