Monitoring changes in climate extremes - A tale of international collaboration

The monitoring and analysis of daily climate records to identify trends in extreme climate events have been primarily limited to data from Canada, the US, the Soviet Union, China, and Australia. Their data was hard to analyze since they used varying measures of extremes. As such, the need to update and converge the findings has been recognized at the November 1999 meeting of what is now known as the joint Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices. The task was to converge the exact formulation of a suite of agreed indices of climate extremes from daily data and the organization of a regional climate-change workshops. As of 2004, a total of five workshops have been conducted in Melbourne. The workshops included participants from neighboring countries and from other areas of the world to provide guidance on the analysis of the climate data.