Climate Extremes

Atmospheric extremes are serious threat to humans as well as vital infrastructures and industries. For instance in the US alone, approximately 640 deaths are annually caused by extreme temperatures (e.g. heat wave); tornadoes have annually claimed 100 lives and 8 billion dollars in damage. The grounding of flights in Phoenix airport (2017) due to extreme heat, and ever-growing number of summer-time wild fires in California are some recent examples of extreme events affecting humans. Some other extreme events are directly relevant to my research, for instance: dust storms, extreme rain events and high winds. As a general rule, the frequency and intensity of most extreme events are increasing in response to climate change. With the advent of high-fidelity and high-resolution atmospheric models (like Ultra-parameterization), I expect extremes of atmospheric flows and their modeling increasingly attract attention in the coming years.

The extreme atmospheric / climate statistics can be used in many different ways: 1) to predict and manage emergencies in a timely manner, 2) human impacts of climate can be studied by focusing on urban areas, 2) prediction of resilience in current infrastructure and designing of the new infrastructure to cope with model-predicted extremes, 3) as an input to loss prevention and hazard estimation models.

To this end, I am collaborating with the Berkeley Lab’s CASCADE project (Bill Collins, Ben Fildier and Alex Charn) to quantify the extent to which various physical mechanisms impact precipitation extremes. Following are the papers that we have published on this topic: