RSS | Sonia Seneviratne "Drivers and feedbacks leading to regional climate extremes"

Prof. Sonia Seneviratne, Associate Professor at ETH Zurich, will be the speaker at this event. This talk will be based on Sonia’s paper entitled “Drivers and feedbacks leading to regional climate extremes: Relevance for climate change adaptation and mitigation”

Abstract

A range of drivers and feedbacks contribute to the occurrence of regional climate extremes (Seneviratne et al. 2012). These in particular include land surface processes and forcings, such as soil moisture and vegetation dynamics, as well and land use and land cover changes. This presentation will review the state of knowledge in this area, focusing on effects of land drivers and feedbacks for droughts and hot extremes (e.g. Seneviratne et al. 2010, Mueller and Seneviratne 2012, Greve et al. 2014, Davin et al. 2014, Seneviratne et al. 2014, Guillod et al. 2015). In particular, I will highlight new advances regarding the possible role of of land use and land cover changes for climate change adaptation, as well as the relevance of land-atmosphere feedbacks for determining global CO2 emissions targets related to regional impacts.