AI-driven weather forecasts enable anticipated attribution of extreme events to human-made climate change

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is altering the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Attributing individual extreme events (EEs) to ACC is becoming crucial to assess the risks of climate change. Traditional attribution methods often suffer from a selection bias, are computationally demanding, and provide answers after the EE occurs. This study presents a ground-breaking hybrid attribution method by combining physics-based ACC estimates from global climate models with deep-learning weather forecasts. This hybrid approach circumvents the framing choices and accelerates the attribution process, paving the way for operational anticipated global forecast-based attribution. We apply this methodology to three distinct high-impact weather EEs. Despite some limitations in predictability, the method uncovers ACC fingerprints in the forecasted fields of EEs. Specifically, forecasts successfully anticipate that ACC exacerbated the 2018 Iberian heatwave, deepened hurricane Florence, and intensified the wind and precipitable water of the explosive cyclone Ciar\'an.