XXN: Extreme extremes in Norway

Extreme rainfall will continue to intensify in all of Norway in lockstep with global temperature, and yearly there are situations where the local damage thresholds are exceeded. Which of these were preceded by rare conditions, and which are more commonplace and therefore more frequent? What of other kinds of extremes; heatwaves, droughts, fire weather, or compound events? And what of other rare conditions, that we have not yet thought of, but that would be highly damaging if they were to occur – especially now that they are supercharged by global warming?

At present we do not know the answers to these questions. However, thanks to recent developments in modelling, high performance computing and understanding of the response of the Scandinavian atmospheric circulation to global warming, we are now in a position to move further here. But like every region, Norway is special. To understand local extreme events, science must make a deep dive into the governing meteorological conditions, taking input from local knowledge of vulnerability and exposure to select the right kinds of events to study.

In XXN, we propose to do this by developing a methodology that can
(i) search for unlikely yet very damaging events and identify their preceding meteorological conditions,
(ii) dissect known or future XX events using high resolution modelling, and
(iii) provide local knowledge of the nature of expected XX events in different regions of Norway in present or near-future.