The relevance of compound events for understanding extreme climate impacts

Extreme climate-related impacts such as crop failure, forest mortality, extreme wildfires and damaging floods challenge the prosperity of human societies. With ongoing climate change, many climate extremes including heatwaves, heavy precipitation events and floods are becoming more extreme, potentially also leading to more extreme impacts. In most cases, however, impacts are the result of multiple compounding drivers. In this talk I will illustrate how the emerging field of compound event research can help to better understand and project extreme climate impacts.

Bio:
Jakob Zscheischler is head of the Department of Compound Environmental Risks at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ and Professor for Data Analytics in Hydro Sciences at TU Dresden, Germany. He holds a diploma degree in mathematics and a PhD in Environmental System Science (2014), for which he conducted the research at the two Max Planck Institutes for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen) and Biogeochemistry (Jena) in Germany. Prior to joining UFZ in 2020 he worked at ETH Zurich and University of Bern in Switzerland. He is an expert in the emerging field of compound weather and climate events at the interface of climate science, climate impact research, statistics and machine learning.

Watch a recording of this talk.