Joel Zeder

CL Climate: Past, Present & Future

The 2022 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Joel Zeder for the poster/PICO entitled:

The challenges of assessing low-likelihood temperature extremes with empirical data of past events (Zeder, J.; Sippel, S.; Fischer, E.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Joel Zeder is a doctoral student in the Climate Physics group at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich (Switzerland). His research focusses on applying advanced statistical tools to better understand grey swan climate extremes, with the aim of learning and transferring insights from millennial climate simulations to actual extreme events.

The work presented at the EGU 2022 General Assembly meeting investigates the challenges in assessing and quantifying the rareness of extreme climate events based on past data up to the event. For example, the record-breaking June 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest was deemed “impossible” by widely applied standard statistical methods. Based on large ensemble climate model data, it could be shown that similar “impossible” events arise in simulations, indicating that statistical biases must be considered in the attribution process of extreme events.