Climate storylines have emerged as an important way for researchers to convey relevant climate-change information to diverse groups of decision-makers. With storylines, researchers describe climate change in terms of impactful weather and climate events, frequently wet or dry extremes, that stakeholders have likely already experienced and responded to, thus providing decision-relevant information on ways these events may evolve in future climate. In this talk, we discuss how object-oriented analysis can advance stakeholder-scientist collaboration by tailoring the climate-change storylines to decision-makers’ specific needs.

Object-oriented analysis can identify decision-relevant events of interest in observations and climate simulations by seeking “objects” in a space-time domain whose diagnosed variables meet specified, decision-relevant criteria, such as exceeding an extreme precipitation threshold. The collection of these objects yields event climatologies that, in turn, lead to decision-relevant storylines. A further benefit of object-oriented analysis arises from pooling together impactful events of different types, thus promoting systematic exploration of the compound behavior of two event types when they occur simultaneously or sequentially. The flexibility of object-oriented analysis plays a key role here by allowing stakeholder interests to determine the event characteristics to diagnose. Further, because the flexibility of object-oriented analysis allows stakeholders of any group to define the events relevant to their needs, interests, and values, object-oriented analyses can give a quantitative voice to the climate-impact concerns of all groups. It thus facilitates equity in the production of decision-relevant understanding of hydroclimatic extremes and their impacts.