Location: Leipzig, Germany

Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

To date, research on compound events and multi-hazard risk has focused more on the physical understanding of processes that drive hazards than on improving preparedness and management of events. Consequently, DAMOCLES held a two-day workshop in Glasgow January 2023 to better understand the critical research questions relating to compound events and/or multi-hazard risk management. The workshop was attended by ~40 policymakers, decision-makers, practitioners and researchers from a range of sectors including energy, (re)insurance, health, transport, water management and disaster risk reduction. An excerpt of the main outcomes highlights the rich reflections shared during the workshop; offers key recommendations for best practice going forward; and suggests a range of opportunities to enhance science-policy-practice interactions within compound events and multi-hazard management.

Location: Uppsala, Sweden

Compound weather and climate events are combinations of multiple climate drivers and/or hazards that contribute to societal or environmental risk. Understanding and analysing compound events require large datasets that allow for sampling the unfortunate combinations causing the impacts. In this context, large ensemble simulations from climate models are very promising for advancing the current understanding of compound events. 

The workshop will bring together people with expertise in compound events and large ensemble simulations. The underlying target will be to share work related to the topic of the workshop, hence networking and fostering collaborations. The participants will have discussions on three main topics (model evaluation and bias correction, storylines and identification of "Black swans", attribution of past and future changes), such as to potentially develop new ideas for future work/projects.

Organisers: Emanuele Bevacqua, Aglaé Jézéquel‬, Mathiue Vrac, Pascal Yiou.

Invited speakers: Sebastian Milinski

Location: ENS Paris, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75005, Paris, Paris, France

Date:  6 October 2021 at 12:00 to 8 October 2021 at 13:00

• Location: UFZ (https://www.ufz.de/leipziger-kubus/index.php?en=41733), Leipzig, Germany
• Agenda: click here
• Meeting Type: Management Committee Meeting,Core Group Meeting,Working Group Meeting
• Meeting Dates: from 2021-10-25 14:00 to 2021-10-27 17:00 (WG meeting from 2021-10-26 9:00 to 2021-10-27 14:30)

• Location: Taltech (https://ttu.ee/projects/mektory-eng/mektory-center/reservable-rooms/grand-conference-hall/), Tallinn, Estonia
• Map: Click here
• Agenda: Click here
• Meeting Type: Management Committee Meeting,Core Group Meeting,Working Group Meeting
• Meeting Dates: from 2019-11-26 9:00 to 2019-11-27 17:00 (WG meeting from 2019-11-26 9:00 to 2019-11-27 14:30)
• Block reservation in SOKOS Hotel
• Ticket Information

The members of working group 4 met in Graz to discuss the objectives and the management of the working group. During the meeting, each participant presented their current research related to DAMOCLES. The discussion topics were mostly on the review of statistical methods to study compound events, on the organization of the Como training school, and on how to move forward as a working group to foster an active European network and train a new generation of climate scientists to use statisticals tools to study compound events.

WG 2 and WG 5 held a joint workshop, at the Climate Analytics premises in Berlin.

The purpose of the meeting was to jointly hammer out detailed processes for and the set-up of the case-studies conducted or associated to the action. We hamonised views on the key features of the case studies under the action, on what kind of stakeholders and how to interact with them, and finally on the nature and sequencing of the physical modeling and stakeholder dialogue. We then jointly identified an initial selection of case studies, thus considerably progressing towards achieving Milestone 2.2.

These initial case studies are summarized as follows (tentative title and person in charge, and persons involved):

1) April-Oct 2017 heat-drought-cyclone event over Portugal (Lead: Rita Cardoso, Involved: Gitta Lasslop, Rita Pongracz, Sonia Quiroga & Cristina Suarez)
Aim: Describe the meteorological conditions for extreme fires on the Iberian peninsula. Influence of heat and drought in agriculture and water management.

2) Impacts of compound events on large-scale hydropower management (Lead: Chris White + PhD student)
Aim: Improve the management of water (for hydropower generation) in Scotland through a better understanding of compound events or understand the risk of compound events on water management (for hydropower generation) in Scotland

3) Climate compound impacts in the agricultural sector (Lead: Sonia Quiroga, Involved: Nina Nikolova, Rita Pongracz, Guerguana Guerove, Ondrej Lhotka, Rita Cordosa, Vera Potopova)
Aim: Farmers’ perception of compound event (drought + heat stress) risks and willingness to get insurance

4) Compound coastal flooding events (Lead: Philip Ward + PhD student)
Aim: How would the calculation of flood risk be affected by calculating joint occurrence of riverine and coastal (surge) flooding?

5) Compound events and renewable energy production (Lead: Wim Thiery & Sebastian Sterl)
Aim: Assessing how compound events affect renewable energy production (mix solar, wind and hydro) (in West Africa)

6) Protecting Baltic Sea from untreated wastewater spillages during flood events in urban areas - NOAH project (Lead: Minna Keinanen-Toivola)

7) Lithuania 2017 rainfall & 2018 drought event (Lead: Egidijus Rimkus)

The case study leads will draft a one pager of each case study and publish them online, on the action's website (Deliverable 2.2).

These initial case studies can act as demonstrations of how stakeholder interaction can work conversely of the benefits of involving stakeholders. They can also act as examples to generate more case studies.

We are looking for further case studies focusing on compound weather and climate events' modelling. If you are interested in any aforementioned case, you could contact us or you could write directly to the lead person.
 

Workshop on physical modeling supporting a “storyline approach”

While narratives or storylines have been used for decades in social sciences and beyond (e.g. RCPs, SSPs, economic risk assessment), the concept of analyzing and communicating high-impact weather extreme events in the climate change context via storylines has recently gained quite some popularity in the climate modeling community.

Storylines are also a useful way to investigate and communicate compound events, which are in the focus of the COST Action (CA17109) DAMOCLES “Understanding and modeling compound climate and weather events”.

Scope:

In this workshop, we will review the current approaches to generate event-based storylines using physical modelling, and explore how they can be most effectively integrated into the wider climate information landscape in a way that helps climate communication and policies.

The workshop is divided into thematic sessions, consisting of a series of short talks followed by breakout sessions, in which we will discuss a number of questions and formulate recommendations for future application of event-based storylines.

The range of topics covered includes:

What are the challenges and advantages of this storyline approach (basically picking a particular event) compared to the full probabilistic approach?

How can storylines or narratives of specific events be combined with probabilistic approaches?

What kind of models (GCM, RCM, convection-permitting, impact models) are required to support the storyline approach, and are useful to include in a model chain approach?

What should be considered when designing the model experiments for localized events (e.g., resolution, ensemble size and design, choice of scenario/forcing/initial conditions)?

What are useful approaches to combine physical with statistical modeling and the knowledge from other domains (e.g., social sciences, impact modeling)?

Webpage : https://www.cicero.oslo.no/en/publications-and-events_twex/workshop-on-physical-modeling-supporting-a-storyline-approach

Report : LINK!!

Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Date: Monday Tuesday December 17-18.12.2018
Place: Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
Česká zemědělská univerzita v Praze
Acronym: CULS/ČZU http://www.czu.cz/cs/

Informations and Agenda

The kick off meeting in Brussels hosted representatives from almost all 28 countries taking part in this network Action, which facilitates the compound event community to join forces and tackle the challenges of compounding extreme weather and climate events.

In this first meeting, the management committee of the Action, under the lead of the Action chair Jakob Zscheischler, elected representatives for several key positions. Further, the committee set the budget for the first budget period. This includes:

• several opportunities for early career investigator (ECI) from Inclusiveness Target Countries to win conference grants for next year’s EGU General Assembly in Vienna
• a number of Short Term Scientific Mission grants,
• travel grants for ECIs to participate at a workshop in Oslo early next year, and
• the organisation and travel support for the first public meeting of the Action in Prague (CZ) on the 17th and 18th of December 2018.

The five working groups within DAMOCLES will be led by a team of two researchers with expertise in the research area of the respective working groups (WG). The two leaders will jointly organise and manage the work of each group and will be in close contact with the other WG leaders to allow a vivid exchange between the different sections of the Action.

In detail, WG 1 under the lead of Alexandre Ramos (Universidade de Lisboa) and Olivia Romppainen-Martius (University of Bern) will develop a generalized framework for the identification, analysis methodology and impact assessment of Compound Events.

WG 2, lead by Sarah D’haen (Climate Analytics) and Dimitra Theochari (National Technical University of Athens), aims it attention to the identification of the current stakeholder network within the Action and map this on a time-space-hazard domain. This work will build on the framework developed in WG 1.

WG 3 is lead by Miguel Mahecha (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry) and Sonia Quiroga (Universidad de Alcalá). This working group focuses on the impacts of Compound Events and the exploration of the applicability of currently available impact databases for compound event research.

WG 4, under the leadership of Aglaé Jezequel (Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et l’Environnement) and Douglas Mauran (University of Graz), assesses statistical methods currently available to describe and analyse multivariate processes. Further, this WG will promote best practices for the investigation of compound events and together with WG 5 facilitate the exchange between statistical and numerical climate modellers.

WG 5, under the lead of Nina Ridder (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) and Ondrej Lhotka (The Czech Academy of Sciences), concentrates on the realistic modelling of specific events to identify the driving mechanisms behind these events and improve their predictability. The event selection will be conducted in close collaboration with the stakeholder network of the Action identified in WG 2.

Other key positions were appointed to:

    Bart van den Hurk (KNMI) – Action vice-chair,

    Christopher White (University of Strathclyde) – Short Term Scientific Missions Manager, and

    Wim Thiery (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) – Science Communications Manager.

http://compoundevents.org/news/official-start-of-the-cost-action-on-understanding-and-modeling-compound-climate-and-weather-events-damocles/