Exceptional flood events: how increasing sample size helps to study their frequency and magnitude

Abstract

Exceptional, i.e. very extreme events, are hardly observed and their frequency and magnitude difficult to study. In this talk, I discuss three methods that enable studying exceptional extreme events absent in observational records: stochastic simulation, reanalysis ensemble pooling, and single-model initialized large ensembles. I apply these different techniques, which aim to increase sample size, to (1) study the frequency of widespread floods in the United States, (2) determine the magnitude of rare floods in Europe, and (3) shed light on the relationship between future increases in extreme precipitation and flooding. These applications suggest that simulation approaches that enable increasing sample size and capture flood variability help to increase our understanding of the drivers and characteristics of exceptional extreme events.

Bio

Manuela I. Brunner is a lecturer in the group of Environmental Hydrological Systems at the University of Freiburg. She did two Postdocs at the National Center for Atmospheric Research NCAR in Boulder CO and in the Group for Mass Movements and Mountain Hydrology at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL in Switzerland. Manuela did her PhD in Geography at the University of Zurich and at the University Grenoble-Alpes.
PhD Thesis: Catchment- and event-type specific synthetic design hydrographs for Swiss catchments
 

Host: Dr.Xi-Lillian Pang

Reference group:
(Prof in Water Conservation Technology) Vladimir Cvetkovic;
(Associate Prof in River Engineering) Joakim Riml;
(Associate Prof in Hydraulic Engineering) Luigia Brandimarte;
(Adjunct Prof in Groundwater Flow Modelling) Jan-Olof Selroos;
(Postdoc in Computational Hydrology) Sina Khatami;
(Postdoc in Environmental Systems Analysis) Mathias Lindkvist;
(PhD in Technical Hydrology) Ida Morén;
(PhD in Hydraulic and Hydrologic Engineering) Shuang Hao
(PhD in Groundwater Dynamics) Chen Chen