Climate storylines as a way of bridging the gap between information and decision-making in hydrological risk

Abstract

Physical climate storylines-physically self-consistent unfoldings of past events, or of plausible future events or pathways [1]-have recently emerged as a way of navigating the cascade of uncertainty that arises when considering the impacts of climate change. The Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [2] has adopted this definition within its Glossary, and the concept is illustrated in Fig 1 . Given the high levels of uncertainty concerning the climate response of remote drivers of regional change such as sea-surface temperature patterns, and of the dynamical conditions leading to extreme events, any attempt to aggregate over that uncertainty inevitably leads to general or weak statements By conditioning on those uncertain aspects of the climate response, storylines provide spatially and temporally coherent scenarios at the regional or local scale. Storylines represent the overall uncertainty in a discrete manner, and are particularly useful for exploring low-likelihood, high-impact outcomes

Topics & Concepts