Official start of the COST Action on 'Understanding and modeling compound climate and weather events (DAMOCLES)'

Yesterday was the official start of the COST Action DAMOCLES (also see our post from the 3rd of May). 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. Researchers interested to join the Action and contribute to the work of the different WGs are invited to contact the Action chair or any other member of the Management Committee. 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.