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A record is an entry in a time series that is greater or smaller than all previous entries. The public perception of climate change is particularly sensitive to record-breaking weather events, which often receive extensive media coverage. As a consequence, a number of recent studies have been aimed at detecting and quantifying the effects of a warming climate on the frequency of temperature records. The mathematical theory of records makes universal and sometimes counter-intuitive predictions about the temporal statistics of record events, but it is largely restricted to stationary time series. After an introduction to the classic theory, I will explain the extensions needed to deal with trends, and the effect of warming on temperature records will be described at different levels of resolution. In the last part of the talk I will discuss time series of precipitation records, where the presence of dry days of zero precipitation induces nontrivial correlations between record-breaking events.

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Joachim Krug, IBP, UoC
Seminar Room 0.03, ETP
Contact: Simon Trebst