Climate change, extreme precipitation events and some implications for risk analysis

One of the primary impacts of a warming climate is the expectation that extreme precipitation will intensify in most regions. This talk will give a broad overview of historical and future climate change and some of its implications for extreme precipitation and infrastructure design, focusing on work that PCIC has contributed to over the past several years. It will conclude with a brief discussion of some of the challenges that users face in risk quantification, and will point to some potentially promising developments that may help to overcome those challenges.

Bio
Dr. Francis Zwiers is director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) at the University of Victoria. His former roles include chief of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis and director of the Climate Research Division, both at Environment and Climate Change Canada. As a research scientist, his expertise is in the application of statistical methods to the analysis of observed and simulated climate variability and change. Dr. Zwiers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, a recipient of the Patterson Medal and President’s Prize, has served as an IPCC Coordinating Lead Author of the Fourth Assessment Report and as an elected member of the IPCC Bureau for the Fifth Assessment Report.