Warren Lecture with Amir AghaKouchak

"Compound Hazards: Typology, Risk and Attribution"

Amir AghaKouchak
Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of California, Irvine

ABSTRACT: Ground-based observations and model simulations show substantial increases in extreme events including rainfall events, droughts, wildfires, hot spells, and heatwaves. A key step toward improving our societal resilience is to identify emerging patterns of climate extremes and natural hazards. This requires a better understanding of tempo-spatial characteristics of natural hazards and also the interactions between different hazards in a changing climate.  A combination of climate events (e.g., high temperatures and high humidity, or low precipitation and high temperatures) may cause a significant impact on the ecosystem and society, although individual events involved may not be severe extremes themselves – a notion known as a compound event (e.g., extreme rain over burned areas, combined ocean and terrestrial flooding). This presentation focuses on three different types of compound events including drought-heatwaves, sea level rise-terrestrial flooding, and meteorological-anthropogenic drought. AghaKouchak presents different methodological frameworks and perspectives for detecting, modeling, and risk assessment of compound and cascading events. AghaKouchak then discuss new frameworks for attribution of compound hazards.