XAIDA – Artificial Intelligence for Detection and Attribution

The last decade has seen a large number of extreme weather and climate events around the globe, causing damage to infrastructure and casualties. This has raised the question about the role of climate change in altering the odds or the magnitude of these extremes.

XAIDA, an EU-funded project starting in September 2021, brings together the interdisciplinary expertise of a research consortium of 16 universities and research organizations. Our consortium unites experts in machine learning, statistics and climate modeling. Together we will design new methods and apply them to recent high-impact events to understand  the role of climate change. Further, we will study if such events, or even more-intense ones, will occur in the future. We will collaborate  with concerned stakeholders from different sectors to prepare risk assessment and adaptation strategies for extreme weather.

The Climate Extremes group contributes to coordination of XAIDA (as of Nov 2023, Dim Coumou is the lead coordinator of XAIDA) and research on heatwaves over Europe (led by Tamara Happe) and drought in the Mediterranean (led by Chiem van Straaten). Methodologically we work with advanced AI methods like auto-encoders and causal discovery algorithms.