Climate and Weather Extremes Seminar

Research on climate and weather extremes is a fundamental part of research at PIK and is carried out in different forms in every department. Extreme climate and weather events pose a serious threat to both the environment and society. Every year, heat waves, wild fires, hurricanes, extreme rainfall events, wind storms and droughts affect people in many parts of the world, causing economic damages and endangering human lives. 2022 saw extreme heat in Western Europe, China and Pakistan while Pakistan was hit by extreme monsoon rains and Himalayan glaciers melting which resulted in a country wide flood killing more than 1700 people and causing $15 billion of damage. While extremes would happen also in a stable climate, anthropogenic induced climate change has already increased the severity and frequency of certain specific extreme events, above all, extreme heat waves in the mid-latitudes and subtropical regions.

The scope of this cross-departmental quasi-monthly meeting is to bring together early career and senior scientists that work on extremes research at PIK, and outside PIK.

This seminar covers a broad list of topics, from atmosphere dynamics and the meteorological patterns which cause extreme weather events, to impacts of such extremes on agriculture, infrastructures, economy and society, to newly developed methods to analyze rare and impactful extreme events. The aim of this seminar is not only to reach a PIK wide audience but also to facilitate learning from one another and fostercollaboration across different groups and research departments. To achieve this goal, when feasible, we intend to organise pairs of 20’ presentations thematically linked but presented by researchers from different research department.

The seminar is held online and in presence about one per month. Everyone is invited to attend and the program for each meeting is sent around a week in advance to pikall@pik-potsdam.de. If you would like to present your research or would like to propose an external presenter, please get in touch with Giorgia Di Capua (dicapua@pik-potsdam.de) or Norbert Marwan (marwan@pik-potsdam.de).

Past International Workshop in Recent Achievements on the Study of Extreme Events (VW-Workshop): EXTREMES2010.

Past seminars

12. February 2025

• Anusha Sree (visiting PhD student in RD4): Characterizing Precipitation Extremes in the Indian Subcontinent: A Peak Over Threshold Approach

27. January 2025

• Lu Zhou (Assistant Professor, Utrecht University): Arctic Atlantification: A Detailed Analysis of Sea Ice and Snow Mass Balance Over Recent Decades

10. December 2024

• Ruijian Gou (visiting PhD student from Ocean University of China): Emerging polar marine extremes and their climate relevance

26. November 2024

• Itamar Karbi (Weizmann Institute of Science, Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science, Rehovot, Israel): The projected changes in the spatial and temporal scales of the mid-latitude flow

9. September 2024

• Dörte Jakob (Bureau of Meteorology, Australia): Understanding climate risk – An Australian perspective

6. June 2024

• Rachel White (University of British Columbia): Understanding the causes and impacts of extreme weather events: heat, cold and extreme precipitation

7. May 2024

• Jan Härter (Chair Climate Physics, Uni Potsdam): Tipping to self-aggregation via mesoscale convective systems

19. March 2024

• Tobias Geiger (DWD): Monitoring, attribution, forecasting, impact modeling and communication – weather and climate extremes research at DWD's regional climate office in Potsdam

31. Januar 2024

1. Nicolas Merener (Associate Professor, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina): Extreme Dry Spells and Larger Storms in the U.S. Midwest Raise Crop Prices
   
   
2. Raed Hamed (postdoc at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): Climate storylines for assessing compound events and extreme crop impacts

10. Januar 2024

1. Yinglin Tian (PhD student at the Tsinghua University and currently visiting student at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ, Leipzig): Changes in causal effect networks of single and compound extreme hot and dry events in Central Europe
2. Giorgia Di Capua (postdoc, RD1): PREVENT: a new PIK-based project on climate change in the Meditarranean

20. November 2023

1. Dr. Elisa Manzini (Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg): Forcing of sudden stratospheric warming events by atmosphere – ocean interactions
2. Dr. Daniela Matei (Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg): Towards an MPI-ESM-ER "eddy-resolving" climate prediction system: Predicting the 2015 subpolar record "Cold-Blob" and its impacts

17. October 2023

1. Melinda Galfi (assistant professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universitejt Amsterdam): Typicality of extreme events
2. Lars Aue (PhD student, AWI Potsdam): Cyclone impacts on sea ice in the Atlantic Arctic Ocean

21. September 2023

1. Anja Katzenberger (PhD candidate RD4): Monsoon Planet: Bimodal rainfall distribution due to barrier-structure in pressure field
2. Fred Hattermann (Deputy head RD2): Trends in hydro-climatic extremes: Observations, climate attribution and projections

29. June 2023

1. Domenico Giaquinto (PhD candidate RD4): Exploring European meteorological droughts through complex networks
2. Ze Jiang (guest at GFZ, research assistant at UNSW Sydney): Implications of spectral transformations in hydro-climatology

25. Mai 2023

1. Luisa Aviles (soon PhD candidate at BAS – Cambridge): Causal Drivers Behind Enhanced Rainfall Activity Over Northern India
2. Felix Strnad (PhD candidate at Uni Tübingen): Propagation pathways of South Asian rainfall extremes and their connection to the large-scale circulation

20. April 2023

1. Massoud Rostami (RD1): A novel theory for the genesis and dynamics of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)-like structures
2. Norbert Marwan and Tobias Braun (RD4): Power spectrum estimation for extreme events data

9. February 2023

1. Shraddha Gupta (RD4): A Complex Network approach to understanding Cyclones
2. Thomas Vogt (RD3): Modeling of historic and future impacts from tropical cyclones on a global scale

8. December 2022

1. Giorgia Di Capua (RD1): Compound extreme events, tropical – extratropical interactions and causality
2. Norbert Marwan (RD4): Methods for Extreme Events Time Series

Who’s working on extremes related research topics at PIK

RD1

Giorgia Di Capua (causality, monsoon, tropical-extratropical interactions)
Massoud Rostami (Aeolus, MJO, atmospheric dynamics)

RD2

Sabine Undorf (climate extremes, attribution, impacts)
Fred Hattermann (Hydro-climatic extremes,impact, adaptation)

RD3

Thomas Vogt (economic impacts of tropical cyclones)
Maximilian Kotz (economic impacts of extremes / attribution )

RD4

Norbert Marwan (complex methods for extremes)
Jürgen Kurths (complex methods for extremes)
Anja Katzenberger (Indian summer monsoon)
Felix Strnad (extreme rainfall, AMOC, early warning)
Shraddha Gupta (complex networks, tropical cyclones)
Jianxin Zhang (flood events, teleconnections)