Extreme Weather Events and Climate Chang

This seminar class will give an overview of the current knowledge of extreme weather events and the impact of anthropogenic climate change on their characteristics. We will start the course by defining extreme weather events and the current state-of-the-art knowledge of how anthropogenic activities influence them, including trends, detection and attribution, as well as future projections. We will discuss the methods typically used for analyzing extreme events and what are the existing uncertainties. The existing warning systems and forecasts for extreme events will be briefly discussed, including their communication and impacts and possible mitigation measures.

Every class (except the last one) will be divided in two parts, the first part will be a lecture, the second an in-class activity for the students, mostly consisting of reading current peer-reviewed papers, both general and specialized papers (if available), on the topic of each class and having discussions about them. The students are expected to read 1 - 2 papers per week and should be able to synthetize their key results, explain them to the class, as well as consider the caveats in the methodology used and possible new avenues to explore in the future. The students will be expected to write 1 – 2 paragraphs about one of the papers per week on courseworks discussion board besides engaging with other students about the readings in class. The papers will be assigned individually or in group, depending on the size of the class.

If there are extreme events occurring during the weeks of the course, we will discuss those case studies, including their forecasts, impacts. 

At the end of the course, the students will present a project based on an extreme event of their choice. They can choose for their project to study either a specific event, such as Hurricane Sandy, or class of events affecting a specific area, such as tornadoes in Oklahoma, and summarize what is known and what they learned about that specific event, focusing on either the meteorological conditions, or their impacts and future risk. The students are expected to use peer reviewed literature for their project and are encouraged to attempt to do new data analysis on the topic, if possible. The instructor will work with the students throughout the course through two outlines to help setting the expectations for the project. The projects will be done in individually or in group, depending on the size of the class.