Projecting Changes in the Drivers of Compound Flooding in Europe Using CMIP6 Models
Speaker: Julius Busecke + Tim Hermans
Date: May 30, 2024
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Format: Hybrid
Virtual: Zoom link provided upon registration
In-person: Columbia Innovation Hub, 2276 12th Avenue, Second Floor, Room 202, New York, NY 10027
Please note that in-person space is limited.
Abstract:
When different flooding drivers co-occur, they can cause compound floods. Despite the potential impact of compound flooding, few studies have projected how the joint probability of flooding drivers may change. Furthermore, existing projections are based on only 5 to 6 climate model simulations because flooding drivers such as storm surges and river run-off need to be simulated offline using computationally expensive hydrodynamic and hydrological models. Here, we use a large ensemble of simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) to project changes in the joint probability of extreme storm surges and precipitation in Europe, enabled by data-proximate cloud computing on the LEAP-Pangeo JupyterHub. To compute storm surges for so many simulations, we apply a statistical storm surge model trained with tide gauge observations and atmospheric forcing from the ERA5 reanalysis. In this seminar, Tim Hermans (Utrecht University) & Julius Busecke (Columbia University) will present these projections, including an in-depth discussion of the statistical methods and full-cloud CMIP6 workflow that were used to develop them.
Bios:
Tim Hermans is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Tim got his PhD degree at the Dutch Royal Institute for Sea Research where he studied sea-level change using global climate model simulations and regional ocean model experiments. During his PhD, he also worked as a Chapter Scientist of the IPCC AR6 WG1 to co-develop the global, regional and extreme sea-level projections of Chapter 9. At Utrecht University, he now studies extreme sea-levels and their compounding effects with other flooding drivers.
Julius Busecke is an Associate Research Scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the Manager for Data and Computing at LEAP. He is a physical oceanographer focusing on the role of ocean transport in various aspects of variability in the coupled earth system. He most recently investigated the fate of oxygen minimum zones in the Pacific ocean. He is an active contributor to the pangeo open source python software stack, and is actively developing tools and data repositories to rapidly analyze petabyte scale datasets like CMIP6 in a fully reproducible way in the cloud.
Learn More: LEAP
