Twitter Youtube

Author: IT ADM

The Second CAFE Workshop Wraps up Successfully

Posted on by IT ADM

The Innovative training network (ITN) CAFE, from a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action financed by the European Commission, held its second workshop from March 23 to April 15, 2021, attended by all ESRs.

The 2nd CAFE Workshop took place over the last three weeks online, with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) serving as its virtual host. The workshop included three inspiring guest lectures by experts in different areas and offered CAFE ESRs the opportunity to meet and report on the progress of their thesis projects. Even though a face-to-face meeting was not possible due to the global pandemic situation, it was once again a great forum for the CAFE network to meet as we move forward with the project.

During the first week, the workshop offered three keynote talks from international experts, open to the general public. These guest lectures were aimed at enhancing and complementing the academic training of the CAFE ESRs.

The first day of the workshop kick-started with a welcome by CAFE team members Álvaro Corral (Centre de Recerca Matemàtica) and Jürgen Kurths (Potsdam Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung), followed by a guest lecture by Sabien Auer, founder and CEO elena international, a start-up specialized in energy transition that has developed an innovative software solution which allows the creation of grid-stable scenarios for the cost‐efficient expansion of renewable energy sources. During her lecture, under the title From Science to Business – Risks, Chances and Learnings, Dr. Auer shared her advice and experience when transferring scientific knowledge to the private sector and discussed its challenges. 

During the second day of the workshop, we had a guest lecture delivered by Petra Friederichs, from the Meteorological Institute of the University of Bonn, about post-processing methods for spatial extremes. The first week of the workshop concluded with a lecture by Sue Ellen Haupt, senior scientist and deputy director at the Research Applications Laboratory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Her talk was focused on the application of Machine Learning in weather and climate applications. 

This workshop provided CAFE ESRs with valuable training and offered them the opportunity to report and present their progress on the individual projects to the rest of the network. All these will help the CAFE ESRs advance with their PhD theses, and also strengthen the bond between the members of the CAFE team.

Stay tuned on our website and twitter (@CAFE_S2SExtrem) for upcoming news and events!

ESRs and Researchers’ night

Posted on by IT ADM

ESRs and Researchers' night

Meriem Krouma | ARIA Technologies

twitter
descarga

___________________________________________________________________________________________

On November 27, 2020, Niclas Rieger, Iago Perez, Noémie Ehstand, and I, Meriem Krouma, participated as early-stage researchers (ESRs) of the CAFE project in the European Researchers’ Night. Through this blog, I want to talk about my experience and the collaboration with my colleagues in such an event. The idea was to talk about climate change, weather extremes, and their impact on daily life. The event was to be given in front of children and online: a real challenge!

The Researchers’ Night was the first time for me as well as for my colleagues particularly in the online format. So, let’s discover together and in exclusivity what happened but let me first introduce the concept of the Researchers’ Night.

The Researchers’ Night is a European public event. It is funded under the Marie actions Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA). It offers researchers the opportunity to show their work interactively and to highlight the contribution of science and its impact on daily life. The objective of this event is also to encourage and inspire young people to pursue a scientific career. The scientific presentations during this event took place simultaneously in around 450 cities in countries across Europe and beyond. The main idea is to bring researchers closer to the public. Researchers’ Night 2020 was the 16th edition and it was maintained online, because of the sanitary context of this special year. As a result, everyone could stay safe at home and it was up to the scientists to come to families and children’s homes through the small screens.

As ESRs, we wanted to take part in this show to present our work and our project which is about weather extreme events. The team was composed of 4 PhD students: Noémie, at Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos (IFISC) in Spain, is working on Coherent structures in sub-seasonal-scale circulation; Niclas, based at Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM) in Spain, works in Sub-seasonal forecasting of extreme precipitation events. Iago is based on Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay, and his PhD work concerns Rossby wave packets and their role in atmospheric predictability; and finally, I, Meriem, am working on ensemble weather predictability at ARIA Technologies and Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l’environnement (LSCE) in Paris, France. We are all doing our PhDs within the CAFE Project. In addition, we were supported by the great help of Daniel Ramos, CRM communication expert.

 

About our experience.

Preparations began a month before the event. The first step was to write the script as recommended by Daniel Ramos, after our first meeting. With great motivation and creativity, we started writing, discussing ideas and different organization points such as how far we wanted to go in this one-hour presentation, which languages to use because we are a multilingual group, what kind of platform and presentation we wanted to do … Then, we opted for the storytelling style: we decided to disseminate our ideas about extremes, climate change, and our PhDs with a scenario that included short stories: each story would tell about a character living somewhere in this big world and confronting problems due to climate change, each character shared his experience and our research projects were a sort of solution to each one. Our idea was to alternate between the participatory and informative approach, we wanted it to be clear, interactive, and joyful at the same time because we believed in the superintelligence of children and that our role is more to facilitate the transmission of the idea to them. The extreme events we chose were marine heatwaves, fires, floods, and droughts respectively associated with a different (fictional) character. As I mentioned earlier, our PhDs were represented as a way to help them. Iago decided to help the character with fire problems, Noémie wanted to help two characters suffering from marine heatwaves and drought, Niclas and I chose the flooding problem. The idea that we wanted to share with kids is that sometimes we could have several solutions for the same problem, as it is possible to have a solution for two quite different problems and also to emphasize that sometimes we won’t be able to find exact solutions for each problem.

A week before the event, we were informed that our participation was not only going to be broadcasted in Europe but also in Uruguay as the university “Universidad of Uruguay” is one of the partner institutions of our project. The idea was to introduce the first edition of Researchers’ Night in Uruguay. We were initially worried a little bit as Niclas, Noémie, and I are beginners in Spanish. But after some discussions, we all decided to participate. In addition, we decided to carry out the event in Spanish so that the event would be clear and understandable for children of any age. And as Iago said: “After all, what is the meaning of research if the knowledge is not shared? Therefore, when they asked me to participate in the Researcher´s Night, I didn’t hesitate. Plus, talking to a younger generation about what extreme climatic events are, their importance, and why they will become more frequent in the near future, is key to explain the importance and danger of this matter”.

November 27, at 6 pm in Europe at 2 pm in Uruguay, after many repetitions and Spanish corrections from Daniel and Iago, that was somewhat a challenge for me, as I was the only one that never has lived in a Spanish-speaking country, so, we started our online live event. We were waiting for children and guess what? We got an audience with an average age of 30 years old, which was unexpected and funny. Despite the stress and some technical problems, we had a great audience, and we did a good performance and I think all of us were satisfied as we had good interaction and questions with our public, as described by Noémie “Pursuing a PhD is not always easy and can become at times frustrating but communicating one’s work and generating interest and positive feedback from a broader audience is always extremely rewarding and motivating. So, I was very happy to participate in this event, even more with such a nice team. Plus it was the first time that I gave a talk in Spanish, which was really fun!” 

And finally, with some of my own thoughts…

It was probably my first experience. I wanted to take part in it because I would like to be involved in mediation actions. I would have preferred it to be in person, just for the pleasure of sharing and explaining to children about the climate and the importance of adopting an eco-responsible attitude since their young age and being aware of what is going on. I would have liked to be able to see their interaction and how far their imagination and understanding can go. I was very much in favor of doing this for the children of Uruguay as well, even though I made more effort to speak in Spanish, but because I still believe that climate change and its impacts, are and will be affecting every corner of this world and that it is good that the dissemination is made equally to all. I was very happy to have shared this experience with people who are as responsible and concerned about the good of others as they are about the world. I learned a lot from the exchanges we had, especially on a human level, that makes me really proud to belong to such a community. I was also happy to receive congratulations about my “very good Spanish” especially from native speakers. In the end, I am thankful for the encouragement of everyone.

The network behind weather and climate

Posted on by IT ADM

The network behind weather and climate

Shraddha Gupta | Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

twitter
descarga

Noémie Ehstand | Institute for Cross Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, IFISC (UIB-CSIC)

twitter
descarga

___________________________________________________________________________________________

What is common about an epidemic, a forest fire and the mobile game Chain Reaction is how the condition of one element influences the other surrounding elements which were in contact with it in some form. Computer science has a popular algorithm named the burning tree algorithm to track this kind of spread. However, as a system becomes more complex in both the way each subsystem behaves on its own and how they interact among each other, this spread of information becomes difficult to track. A common perspective towards understanding many such real-world complex systems, like the internet, ecological, social, and biological systems, and even the human brain, is to model them as a complex network. A network is a collection of nodes and links. A link connects two nodes, representing some relationship between them, such as physical interaction or statistical dependency. For example, in a social network, each person can be considered as a node and friendship between two persons represent their link.

Fig 1: Visualization of a network nodes and links

What networks have to do with Climate ?

Thinking carefully, we realize that the weather or climate of one place influences that of another place – sometimes nearby, as if the wind carried the rain bearing clouds from one’s hometown to the next town, and at times distant places, separated by thousands of miles. To draw a parallel, with our previous examples, the Earth’s climate system is a complex system made up of a huge number of nonlinear subsystems with mutual nonlinear interactions on a wide range of spatial scales ranging from several metres to thousands of kilometres, and can thus be modelled by using complex networks to get a better understanding.

The EU-funded CAFE project brings together researchers from various disciplines like meteorology, physics, computer science, etc., and from different parts of the world to address the challenge of forecasting extreme events from diverse perspectives. We, Shraddha and Noémie, are doctoral researchers within the CAFE project. At our respective institutes, PIK (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research) and IFISC (Institute for Cross Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems), we both explore the potential of network tools in climate and weather.

Shraddha’s project: a functional network approach to Earth’s Climate System

Over the years, researchers have tried to model the climate system using fundamental physical laws to be able to forecast weather. However, till date, the knowledge of the different elements of the climate system and their interactions is incomplete, and the processes only partially understood, leading to a deviation of forecasting from the observations. But, the advancement of technology has made possible an array of instruments like satellites, buoys, radars, for obtaining observed data of various climate variables such as temperature, pressure, rainfall, etc.  In that regard, ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), a CAFE partner, operates one of the leading programmes for monitoring the Earth’s environment using satellite and in-situ observations – the EU-funded Copernicus programme.

In my project, we utilize the concept of functional complex network that uses the observed data to optimally infer the network that more closely resembles the actual connectivity of the climate system. The procedure is to infer the interactions between different geographical points on the Earth’s surface through the statistical study of interdependence – correlations, synchronicity – to form an ‘almost’ complete picture of the different mechanisms and their impacts over short and long distances.

Fig 2: Illustration showing construction of a climate network using functional complex network approach. Nodes are the spatial grid points on the Earth’s surface and interactions between nodes are computed using statistical measures like correlation between the climatological variables at those nodes.

Our Complexity Science group at PIK studies climate networks in order to gain a deeper insight into the underlying global patterns and teleconnections of extreme events like floods, heatwaves, etc. This approach is an essential ingredient in the discovery of the climate backbone. In my project, I strive for a better understanding of the mechanisms that connect the different monsoon systems around the world, such as the synchronization between Indian Summer Monsoon and East Asian Monsoon, and the role played by atmospheric teleconnections such as El Nino Southern Oscillation and Madden-Julian Oscillation, thereby leading to an improved sub-seasonal prediction of extremes. We have also applied the methodology to understand the topology and dynamics of regional weather systems during short-lived weather extremes like the tropical cyclones. Finally, we will try to find out what the state-of-the-art weather forecast modelling systems lacks, by comparing the climate network constructed from observation data with that constructed from model data.

Fig 3: Extreme rainfall teleconnection pattern for Indian Summer monsoon obtained using climate network approach (Boers et al., 2019 [1])

Noemie’s project: a flow network approach to large-scale weather systems

An alternative to the functional network approach is to construct the climate network based on the actual physical transport of air, water, or other substances between different geographical locations. Networks that are created in this manner are called Lagrangian Flow networks. In recent years, they have been used in several scientific studies to uncover time dependent structures that shape transport in oceanic and atmospheric flows. Perhaps the simplest examples of such structures are eddies and gyres in the ocean and vortices in the atmosphere though there can also be more complex structural pathways.

Fig 4: A large phytoplankton gyre off the east coast of Japan.

Our group, Nonlinear Dynamics in Fluids at IFISC, first introduced Lagrangian Flow Networks [2] and has contributed to some of the most recent successes in their application to geophysical flows. This includes for instance the characterization of marine connectivity in the Mediterranean Sea allowing for a better understanding of the spatial organization of marine populations and the design of marine protected areas [3]. In the atmosphere, they have been used to highlight important structures associated with so called blocking events [4].

Fig 5: Illustration of a Lagrangian Flow network construction in the atmosphere. Each square is a network node. To set up the links we follow the movement of tracers carried by the winds, as they travel between nodes

Blocking events are large-scale atmospheric pressure patterns which are almost stationary. These pressure patterns can remain in place for several days to weeks, disturbing the usual west-east circulation of weather regimes over the mid-latitudes. As a consequence, longer periods of extreme weather can be experienced on the ground, such as heat waves and cold spells. Scientists have been studying these events for decades, yet a comprehensive theory explaining their onset, maintenance and decay remains to be found. Besides, these events are of primary importance in the context of CAFE as they are a key source of predictability at the sub-seasonal timescale (from 10 days to 3 months). 

Fig 6: Left : illustration of an omega block, a common blocked pressure pattern consisting of a  high pressure cell sandwiched in between two lows. Right : In the summer of 2010 an unusually persistent blocking event over Western Russia, led to an extreme heatwave, causing devastating forest fires, high economic losses and increased mortality rates. Photo taken near a suburb of Voronezh on Sunday, Aug. 1, 2010. (AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel).

In my project, I am investigating further the potential of Lagrangian Flow Network to trace moving structures in space and time associated with blocking events. We expect to uncover specific flow configurations related to the blocking regime transition. We plan to extend this setting to other phenomena relevant for prediction at the sub-seasonal time scale such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation. Many hidden coherent pathways are likely to be discovered in these geophysical phenomena.

Results to come soon. Stay tuned for our next post!

Shraddha Gupta and Noémie Ehstand are doctoral researchers within the CAFE project. Shraddha is working in the Complexity Science group at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Potsdam, Germany, under the supervision of Jürgen Kurths (PIK) and Florian Pappenberger (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; ECMWF). She is affiliated to Humboldt University at Berlin, Germany. Noémie is working at the Institute for Cross Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, IFISC (UIB-CSIC), in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, under the supervision of Emilio Hernández-García (IFISC) and Reik Donner (PIK).

 

References

[1] N. Boers, B. Goswami, A. Rheinwalt et al., Nature 566, 373–377, (2019)
[2] E. Ser-Giacomi, V. Rossi, C. López, E. Hernández-García, Chaos 25(3), 036404 (2015).
[3] V. Rossi, E. Ser-Giacomi, C. López, E. Hernández-García, Geophysical Research Letters 41(8), 2883–2891 (2014).
[4] E. Ser-Giacomi, R. Vasile, I. Recuerda, E. Hernández-García, C. López, Chaos 25(8), 87413 (2015).

 

Further reading

[1] Dijkstra, H., Hernández-García, E., Masoller, C., & Barreiro, M. (2019). Networks in Climate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316275757

How hacking can mitigate the impacts of natural hazards

Posted on by IT ADM

How hacking can mitigate the impacts of natural hazards

Niclas Rieger | Centre de Recerca Matemàtica

Nikos Mastrantonas | European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Recently, we had the opportunity to participate in the Copernicus Barcelona Hackathon, an intense 3-day hacking event (16-18 October 2020). We were fortunate to contribute in the development of ideas and prototypes that can support the mitigation of risks related to natural hazards. In this blogpost, we would like to present our personal experiences before and during the event, give some information about the projects we worked on, and briefly summarize why we really enjoyed our involvement in this hackathon.

But first, let’s give a short background about what a hackathon is and what it aims at…

A hackathon is an event that brings together participants of various fields that work together in interdisciplinary groups tackling a specific challenge within a short timeframe. The goal is to develop innovative ideas and translate them into prototypes with the delivery of a functioning software/hardware by the end of the event.

In this context, the Copernicus Hackathon Programme brings together developers, entrepreneurs and topic-specific experts to develop new applications based on Copernicus Earth observation data and services. Every year there are multiple hackathons across Europe organized by the programme, with the Copernicus Barcelona Hackathon being one of them. 

The specific challenges addressed by this event were related to natural hazards, a very relevant topic to the CAFE project and our professional interests. Also, due to the ongoing COVID pandemic the event was fully online, making it easier to participate, even from the comfort of our rooms 😊 Thus, we decided to attend the event and experience this format for the first time in our lives!

Niclas

Thursday, 14:00h (73h left to final pitch)

The team. More than 50 people unknown to me (except Nikos) cavort in the Slack Channel, which is supposed to be the organizational base of the Hackathon. It’s probably due to my (too often and too gladly taken) role as an observer that my team size so far has reliably not increased above 1. I aim somewhat uncertainly into the crowd and based on indicators that are important to me (my gut feeling), I write to a few participants directly. Lucky strike. Not least thanks to Elaine’s enthusiasm and positive energy, within a few hours I’m in Team TBD*, a colorful mixture of Business Development, GIS, Machine Learning and Climate Science.

 *TBD = to be decided; at this point I’d like to advise future Hackathon teams against this frivolous naming strategy, if you don’t want to find out during the final presentation that you never changed the name 😉

Friday, 19.00h (44h left to final pitch)

The idea. The Hackathon has now officially begun! Energy wave! Enthusiasm! Our team is ready to go, the discussion is in full swing! The numerous introductory presentations have shown: everything can work here. From relevant weather and climate data solutions to the combination of OpenStreetMapping and the integration of social media data. The range of possibilities is enormous … and overwhelming. Decide quickly now and then go!

Fig. 1 | The severity of Covid-19 cases is probably influenced, among other things, by the level of air pollution. Primarily an urban problem, air pollution is mainly driven by man-made emissions from traffic and industry. But also natural phenomena like wildfires or volcanoes can affect the air quality.

Saturday 10.00h (29h left to final pitch)

The (lack of)understanding. Shaking my head inwardly, but outwardly calm and composed, I declare for the umpteenth time: “The currently existing data only gives a certain resolution. Technically, it is not possible to go beyond”. On the other side sits Elaine who replies confidently: “I understand, but from the point of view of the business model, it doesn’t make sense. We will practically not be able to market this product. We need better resolution!” Inside, she’s probably shaking her head right now.

Sunday, 03.00 h (12h left to final pitch)

The pot of coffee. Empty. Again.

Sunday, 11:00 h (4h left to final pitch)

Yeah, sure. Only one hour left until the delivery of the prototype and the only thing we can get out of the Python script is a RuntimeError. A bit typical and definitely one of those classic moments where you curse Python, the computer and also yourself for doing this. After all, nobody forces us to do it, right? Well, focus! Time (as well as the computer) is against us, but to throw in on the last meters of the home stretch would be a bit silly. And not fair, after all, the rest of the team has the same situation.

Sunday, 17.00h (2h after the final pitch)

The home stretch. Somehow we have arrived. The analogy of the marathon is not so wrong. Despite the lack of sleep, the body mobilizes some energy reserves with a final shot of adrenaline (and some caffeine) in the last few meters. Relief as well as disbelief about what has just been achieved alternate with each other at an incredible pace. And while you somehow try to remember the individual stages of the last hours, you realize once again that together is easier than alone. 

In this sense, a big thank you to my team: Elaine, Mahabir and Yuan. You fought step by step until the end for the seemingly unreachable 1st place.

Fig. 2 | Our final product - 5-day risk assessment forecast of severe Covid-19 due to air pollution for France. We base our risk estimation on (i) the current number of Covid-19 infections (hazard), (ii) CAMS forecast of particulate matter <2.5 µm (PM2.5) (vulnerability) and (iii) the total population living in each French community (exposure).

Nikos

Joining a hackathon for the first time is already an interesting experience. Joining as an individual member without a preformed team and being unaware of the expertise, interests and the number of the other individual participants, has its additional challenges 😛 Nevertheless, uncertainties and the unknown are also part of life, and in fact a very exciting one. Thus, I decided to register for this event (thanks Florian for making me aware of it!).

The actual event started on Friday 16th October, but all participants were able to join a dedicated communication channel and start forming teams from Monday 12th October. And here starts the exciting journey of this hackathon and the roller-coaster of feelings and emotions.

To my surprise I noticed many familiar names among the participants; mainly friends and alumni from IHE Delft and the MSc I attended (Flood Risk Management), and co-volunteers at the Water Youth Network. A nice start to boost up the levels of confidence and enthusiasm. And now comes the step of joining a team: so many people with a lot of different experiences, expertise and backgrounds, certainly a nice way to form a complementary team, … or to get lost in the translation and the challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations. 

By Tuesday I had already joined a team aiming at providing solutions for users in Tanzania; an idea that I found very exciting and helpful for an audience with less direct access to information. Full of energy, together with the other teammates we started researching Copernicus products to be used and ways to convey the information to the end users. But smooth and straightforward pathways are not always feasible. Unfortunately, by Saturday noon two of the team members had to withdraw due to unexpected personal obligations, which made the completion of the project an impossible task. Therefore, we decided to work on this idea outside of the hackathon and abandon it for this event. Once again it all came back to the start, searching for a new team and project idea. But this time, already mid-way through the hackathon.

I was about to stop the quest, when two of my former IHE colleagues, Adele Young and Thaine H. Assumpção, informed me that I could join their team. And the excitement reaches the sky once more. The three of us, together with Gijs van den Dool, a Natural Catastrophe Modelling specialist, formed a team looking at ways to improve and update the provided information about hazard, vulnerability, exposure and risk. And the name of the team… Up2Date.

Fig. 3 | Up2Date team - from upper left clockwise: Gijs van den Dool, Adele Young, Thaine Assumpcao, Nikos Mastrantonas

Everyone started suggesting ways to make the idea more concrete and specific; advocating for particular products, tools, study areas, end-users, etc. By Saturday night, after hours of debating and productive discussions (in which at times temperaments flared, resulting in even better conclusions), we managed to finalize our idea. We focused on the agricultural sector and how we can use the latest available remote sensing information to improve the vulnerability assessment and increase the preparedness of the stakeholders. And so, here we are, tired and exhausted, working hard all Saturday night till Sunday morning, to finalize the required deliverables and preparing the slides for the final pitch. Lots of stress to finish on time, and excitement for pitching our idea to the evaluation committee and the rest of the participants. At this stage the support from the organizers and mentors was invaluable and special thanks should be given to Milan Kalas, Alexandre Sanchez and Calum Baugh.

Fig. 4 | Huge storm front approaches an agricultural field. Providing more accurate vulnerability information (e.g. crop phenology, real-time cultivated areas) can facilitate improved decision making.

Eventually hard work pays off, and we managed to get 2nd place at this event! 😊 Hackathon is already over, but our project idea and prototype are in their initial stages. Now we are searching for opportunities to further develop this work. Let’s see what the future will bring …

Concluding remarks

And what conclusions do we both draw at the end of the day (or better the weekend)? Perspectives, perspectives and perspectives.

(i) For us as young scientists, the continuous focus on the final product, to deliver quickly applicable results and all this under high time pressure was sometimes new – and therefore exciting! It may also have been a small advantage that we as CAFEtarians know how to deal with long working hours and few breaks (coffee!).

(ii) Complex problems can sometimes be solved in a certain way. But sometimes they can be better solved in a different way. Interdisciplinary groups allow us to tap the full potential of solutions and make possible what we as experts in our field can hardly do alone.

(iii) A more diverse group broadens the possible solution horizon, but also broadens the space for possible conflicts. And here too, perspective is important. Situations, discussions and problems can be perceived as tiring, frustrating and demotivating, but they can also be challenging, stimulating and guiding. In the end it is up to us to decide which perspective we want to take.

Therefore, we would like to encourage more people to attend such events, get out of their comfort zones, and live the experience of a hackathon; this is surely something we would attempt again in the future! Till that time, back to our daily life and the CAFE-related tasks! And in fact, there are a lot of interesting things happening in the CAFE world, so stay tuned for upcoming publications and outreach activities! 😊

—————————————————————————————————————————————

Niclas Rieger [ResearchGate profile] is an Early Career Researcher and PhD candidate at the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica (CRM). His research topic is the “Sub-seasonal forecasting of extreme precipitation events using sea surface salinity and other sea surface variables as predictors”.

Nikos Mastrantonas  [ResearchGate profile] is an Early Career Researcher at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and a PhD candidate at the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg (TUBAF). His research topic is the “Predictability of large-scale atmospheric flow patterns over the Mediterranean connected to extreme weather”.

Online talk 'The extremes of the weather' at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo – Uruguay)

Posted on by IT ADM

Online talk 'The extremes of the weather' at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo - Uruguay)

Online talk of the ITN-CAFE project (Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes) at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo – Uruguay)

 
The extremes of the weather
 

📅 November 27, 2020, 2:00 p.m. Montevideo time (6:00 p.m. Barcelona time)

🗣 Spanish

🔗 www.crowdcast.io/e/los-extremos-del-clima/register

Hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves… these are phenomena that occur infrequently but when they do occur they can have devastating effects. In the study of weather, they are called extreme events.

In this talk for the Researchers Night of the University of the Republic (Uruguay), four young researchers from the international group CAFE (Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes) will explore examples of the extreme events that we study, how our research can help early detection of these phenomena with greater anticipation and precision, as well as what scientists, politicians, and all of us as a society can do to mitigate their negative effects in the future.

With:

  • Iago Pérez (Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay)
  • Meriem Krouma (Aria Technologies, Paris, France)
  • Niclas Rieger (Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Barcelona, ​​Spain)
  • Noémie Ehstand (Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, Palma de Mallorca, Spain)

Online talk ‘The extremes of the weather’ at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo – Uruguay)

Posted on by IT ADM

Online talk 'The extremes of the weather' at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo - Uruguay)

Online talk of the ITN-CAFE project (Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes) at the Researchers Night organized by the University of the Republic (Montevideo – Uruguay)

 
The extremes of the weather
 

📅 November 27, 2020, 2:00 p.m. Montevideo time (6:00 p.m. Barcelona time)

🗣 Spanish

🔗 www.crowdcast.io/e/los-extremos-del-clima/register

Hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves… these are phenomena that occur infrequently but when they do occur they can have devastating effects. In the study of weather, they are called extreme events.

In this talk for the Researchers Night of the University of the Republic (Uruguay), four young researchers from the international group CAFE (Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes) will explore examples of the extreme events that we study, how our research can help early detection of these phenomena with greater anticipation and precision, as well as what scientists, politicians, and all of us as a society can do to mitigate their negative effects in the future.

With:

  • Iago Pérez (Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay)
  • Meriem Krouma (Aria Technologies, Paris, France)
  • Niclas Rieger (Centre de Recerca Matemàtica, Barcelona, ​​Spain)
  • Noémie Ehstand (Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, Palma de Mallorca, Spain)

Towards sub-seasonal predictability of extreme weather over Europe

Posted on by IT ADM

Emmanuel Rouges and Nikolaos Mastrantonas, ECMWF Scientists, Diagnostics Section.

We are scientists in the ECMWF Diagnostics team working on the sub-seasonal predictability of extreme weather over Europe, within the EU-funded CAFE project. CAFE’s goal is to improve predictability at sub-seasonal timescales by developing an interdisciplinary network of highly trained researchers. There are 12 researchers in total, of which ECMWF hosts 2.

Our research at ECMWF is focused on sub-seasonal predictability over Europe and we share some of our early results in this blog, as well as discussing the importance of forecasting at this timescale.

Cafe Blog Figure 1A

The 12 early stage researchers (ESRs) and some of the senior researchers of the CAFE project, during the CAFE 1st summer school in Sitges, Spain, in November 2019.

You can read the complete article at the ECMWF science blog section (link).

CAFE COURSE: Impact of climate change on the global water cycle and extreme events

Posted on by IT ADM

Dr. Hervé Douville (Météo-France) will conduct the curse Impact of climate change on the global water cycle and extreme events, originally scheduled for the 2nd CAFE School in Freiberg last March, on 16th and 18th June (2-3.30pm, Q&A inc.). This course, focused on Impact of climate change on the global water cycle and extreme weather, will be done online (via BlueJeans). 

If you wish to attend, please contact us at cafeproject@crm.cat and we will provide you with the link to join the course online.

UPDATE:

You can find and download the presentations from this course on the following links:

 

CAFE Douville 2020 part1

CAFE Douville 2020 part2

CAFE Welcomes 12 Early Stage Researchers

Posted on by IT ADM

CAFE Welcomes 12 Early Stage Researchers

CAFE completes the recruitment of 12 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs). The ESRs will be based with network partners across Europe and South America in Spain, France, Germany, the U.K and Uruguay. 

With the start of the new year, we can finally welcome our 12 Early Stage Students in full as all of them have joined their respective teams. 

Each ESR will undertake an individual research project leading to the award of a PhD, working alongside the team members of the CAFE research group, with the objective of improving the forecasting of climate extremes, such as heat waves, drought, extreme precipitation or cold surges, on the sub-seasonal time scale (from 10 days to about 3 months). 

Nikolaos Mastrantonas

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts,

Reading, UK.

Mónica Minjares

Centre de Recerca Matemàtica,

Barcelona, Spain.

Xinjia Hu

Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems,

Dresden, Germany.

Meriem Krouma

Aria Technologies,

Paris, France.

Riccardo Silini

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya,

Barcelona, Spain.

Emmanuel Rouges

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts,

Reading, UK.

Niclas Rieger

Centre de Recerca Matemàtica,

Barcelona, Spain.

Iago Pérez

Universidad de la República,

Montevideo, Uruguay.

Shraddha Gupta

Potsdam Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung,

Berlin, Germany.

Pedro Herrera Lormendez

Technische Universitaet Bergakademie Freiberg,

Freiberg, Germany.

Noémie Ehstand

CSIC – Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos,

Palma de Mallorca, Spain.

Amal John

Météo-France,

Toulouse, France.

The next big event for them will come on March, when the 2nd CAFE School will be held in Freiberg and Dresden, Germany. If you want to know more about the progress made by the CAFE ESRs and the rest of the team, please follow us on Twitter and subscribe to the CAFE youtube channel.

Doctoral student at TU Freiberg researches climate change and its effects on the weather

Posted on by IT ADM

Pedro Herrera Lormendez is a doctoral student at the TU Freiberg and one of a total of 12 young researchers in the international training project “Climate Advanced Forecasting of sub-seasonal Extremes” (CAFE). There he is working on weather patterns and their changes due to climate change.

Since November 2019, Herrera, a PhD student from Mexico, is at the Interdisciplinary Ecological Centre of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, where he is training on climate science, data analysis and climate extremes. Over the next three years, he will study large-scale weather patterns in Europe and analyse their changes: “This will enable me to identify connections with new climate phenomena and extreme events and to understand how these extreme weather events are triggered on the continent,” explains Herrera. Such events include, for example, heat waves, droughts, extreme precipitation and storm surges, which have enormous social and economic impacts and are expected to increase in the coming decades due to global warming.
 

He will be supervised by Prof. Jörg Matschullat of the TU Bergakademie Freiberg and Dr. Hervé Douville of the French Meteorological Service.

In order to broaden the knowledge of the young researchers, they meet in various workshops and do internships at other research institutions. It was not until November 2019 that they all met at the 1st CAFE School in Barcelona. “In 10 intensive days we received further training in data science, teamwork, atmospheric physics and other climate-related topics. Now I can understand the first results of my research even better and link them to the atmospheric processes that control these changes,” explains Herrera.

Above all, he hopes that his research will yield important results that will improve our understanding of the changing climate and provide him with a valuable network of people with whom he can continue to work in the future to tackle the challenges of the coming decades. To this end, he will visit the TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Météo-France in Toulouse, ARIA Technologies in Paris and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona for research stays over the next three years.

C.A.F.E. is part of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network with ten international partners.  The project is funded by the EU with more than 3 million Euros within the EU research framework programme “Horizon 2020” and deals with possibilities of improving forecasting of extreme weather in connection with climate change.

More information at: https://tu-freiberg.de/en/presse/doctoral-student-at-tu-freiberg-researches-climate-change-and-its-effects-on-the-weather