Pinning down these connections, most agree, has less to do with running a postmortem on a specific event and more to do with figuring out future risk, and how likely it is that such an event will occur in the future – very practical information for everyone from farmers and businesspeople to urban planners.
“Attribution is an attempt to explain so you can better predict when the event happens again,” says Martin Hoerling at NOAA. Urban planners, he says, “don’t want to invest in the rear view, ... only to find out that the 1-in-100 year event is now a 1-in-30 year event.”
Hoerling says he hopes that improving science and investments in data gathering will help the Weather Service produce better and more relevant forecasts, with longer lead times.
David Titley, director of Penn State's Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, says the progress in 15 years has been significant: “In a short period of time, people have been able to run computer models with the old atmosphere and the current one and be able to do robust enough statistics to say, there’s a real difference here.”
