Climate change impacts on extreme weather

The goal of this paper is to bring a risk‐based mindset to the challenge of climate change and its effects on atmospheric perils of relevance to catastrophe modeling. Section 1 summarizes some key elements of climate and climate change and its relevance for weather extremes. Section 2 provides a synthesis of the latest scientific knowledge about how specific weather extremes may be affected by climate change, especially toward the end of the 21st century. Section 3 identifies some of the complications and uncertainties surrounding the results and suggests a possible path forward for the developers and users of catastrophe models.

There are many possible research avenues to pursue regarding climate change and catastrophe modeling, but the most relevant information will only be identified with input from what is important to the insurance industry. This report highlights three possible areas: first, more detailed investigations of changes in climate variability; second, more targeted analyses of parameters most relevant to catastrophes; third, the assessment of spatial and temporal correlations between extreme events (e.g., due to changes in sea level and atmospheric moisture) in a warming climate.