Extreme weather and climate change

Abstract This chapter gives an introduction and a broad overview on the current scientific understanding and approaches to analyze weather and climate extremes in the context of observed climate change. It discusses the various options to define extreme events and highlights the challenges in detecting trends in observational records as extreme events are rare by definition. A wide range of weather and climate extremes exist, which have the potential to severely impact society. Here, the focus lies on temperature extremes, precipitation extremes, and tropical cyclones, for which we give examples of different indices to capture the intensity, frequency, and duration of these extremes, indicate links to their societal impacts, and provide insights in the current scientific understanding of attributing the observed changes to climate change.