The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is orgamzmg, in collaboration with the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), a Summer School on Attribution and Prediction of Extreme Events, to be held at ICTP, Trieste (Italy), from 21 July to 1 August 2014. 
 

PURPOSE OF THE SCHOOL 

The purpose of the School is to train students with outstanding research potential in the techniques that will be required to better understand observed and future changes in extremes. There is a pressing need to educate future researchers in the techniques given the prominence and importance of societal and scientific questions about extreme events that are receiving increasingly intense attention in the minds of the public and their policy makers. The School will be organized around three broad topic areas:

• Statistical theory underpinning extreme value analysis; 

• Detection and attribution of observed changes in the frequency and/or intensity of extremes; 

• Event attribution, and the physical mechanisms that are involved in amplifying and/or extending the duration of some specific extreme events such as heat waves. 
 

The School will also educate students in the development of some of the key data resources that are used to place current extremes into a historical context, and will provide insights into some of the emerging thinking on the near term prediction of the likelihood of extreme events. 

The School will also teach the importance of understanding the physical mechanisms that produce many of the most impactful extreme events, including "complex" hydrologic extremes such as drought and the role of coupled land-atmosphere feedback mechanisms in amplifying extreme temperature events. 

FORMAT 

The two-week School will consist of lectures combined with the practical application of the material covered in the lectures through introductory lab sessions and a set of research problems that will form the core of the School. The research topics will include data set development, detection and attribution, extreme events prediction, and event attribution. These will rely on the use of the advanced analysis techniques that will be taught at the School and an understanding of the relevant underpinning physical processes.