Climate Sense

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bserving

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redicting

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the end, the participants give a brief presentation on their national

results, and an expert collates the results and gives an overview of

the trends and variability in extremes across the whole region. The

benefits of working across national borders are numerous: confi-

dence in local analyses is increased by placing them in a larger,

regional context that includes results from neighbouring stations

and countries; regional research synergies are also enhanced by

sharing insights and improve analyses between neighbouring coun-

tries. A post-workshop follow-up process produces a peer-reviewed

journal article on analysis of climate change for the given region,

and makes available the indices data in the analysis. The workshops

therefore enhance the capacity of countries to extract important

climate change information from their long-term daily data, and

foster regional collaboration in climate analyses.

Between 1998 and 2004, APN sponsored a total of five work-

shops in Melbourne to promote this activity in Southeast Asia

and the South Pacific. At the same time, ETCCDI coordinated

workshops in the Caribbean and Africa. Owing to a number of

difficulties, only parts of the results were available in time to

contribute to the global extreme analysis prepared for the IPCC

Third Assessment Report. A second series of ETCCDI workshops

provided much improved input to the IPCC Fourth Assessment

Report (AR4). Since the release of AR4, new workshops have

also been conduced and planned.

ETCCDI indices have been

released and are available at

http://cccma.seos.uvic.ca/etccdi;

they

have already been of great use to scientists working on

adaptation and climate model validation. The National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National

Climate Data Center and the Climate Research

Division of Environment Canada are jointly develop-

ing a variant of the ETCCDI index set as a basis for the

North American Climate Extreme Monitor.

Effective adaptation to the changing climate requires

not only more and better information about future

changes in climate from improved climate models, but

also better information about past climate change and

current climate. To address this need, ETCCDI has coor-

dinated the formulation of a suite of climate indices that

describe different aspects of moderate temperature and

precipitation extremes including frequency, intensity and

duration. Environment Canada has also developed open

source software for the calculation indices and for climate

data homogenization, and has made this software freely

available. These tools – together with a series of ETCCDI

coordinated regional capacity building workshops

– have played and will continue to play an important

role in monitoring changes in extremes, climate model

evaluation and assessment of future climate. These proc-

esses, in turn, provide the vital climate information that

is required for climate change adaptation.

Participants from nine countries improving their capacity to process climate change data and interpret the results at the ETCCDI workshop for Central Africa, which

was held from 23-27 April 2007, in Brazzaville, Congo

Image: Xuebin Zhang