I have not been keeping up here the last few months. To start the catching up process:

During the fall and winter I was part of a committee convened by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to perform a study on extreme event attribution. This is the science of making specific, quantitative statements about how a specific individual weather event was influenced by human-induced climate change. It was a wonderful experience working with my colleagues on the committee, most of whom I hadn’t known before, and (not having previously worked on attribution myself and thus not being an expert in it before we started) I learned a great deal. Not just about the subject matter, either – tt was my first NAS committee and very informative to see how the sausage is made. We think the report came out very well, and it seems to have been well received.

The report itself is available for free online in electronic form; hard copies cost money (and aren’t available yet). I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post’s Capitol Weather Gang (thanks Jason Samenow!) to express some of my own perspective in a more informal way. Climate Central Chief Scientist Heidi Cullen wrote one for the NY Times, and my colleague on the committee (and former AMS President) Marshall Shepherd wrote one in Forbes. There was lots of other media coverage, easily found through your favorite search engine; here’s a piece on the Lamont web page by Stacy Morford.

On Thursday, April 7, I’ll be speaking at an event about the report with committee chair Rear Adm. Dr. David Titley and AP science reporter Seth Borenstein, moderated by Heidi Cullen, at the NAS Koshland Museum.