Extreme flood events have been and continue to be one of the most important natural hazards responsible for deaths and economic losses. Extreme floods result in direct destructive effects during the time of the event, and they also may be followed by a related chain of indirect calamities such as famines and epidemics that produce additional damages and suffering. Extreme hydrological events th...

In the first week of January 2014 Schloss Dagstuhl hosted a Perspectives Workshop on “Connecting Performance Analysis and Visualization to Advance Extreme Scale Computing”. The workshop brought together two previously separate communities – from Visualization and Performance Analysis for High Performance Computing – to discuss a long term joint research agenda. The goal was to identify and addr...

Food security assessment in sub-Saharan Africa requires simultaneous consideration of multiple socio-economic and environmental variables. Early identification of populations at risk enables timely and appropriate action. Since large and widely dispersed populations depend on rainfed agriculture and pastoralism, climate monitoring and forecasting are important inputs to food security analysis. ...

The increasing frequency and/or severity of extreme climate events are becoming increasingly apparent over multidecadal timescales at the global scale, albeit with relatively low scientific confidence. At the regional scale, scientific confidence in the future trends of extreme event likelihood is stronger, although the trends are spatially variable. Confidence in these extreme climate risks is...

This short course covers the application of the statistical theory of extreme values to climate, in general, and to climate change, in particular. The statistical theory of extreme values is briefly reviewed, both the extremal types theorem with its application via the block maxima approach (i.e., fitting the generalized extreme value distribution) and the point process model with its applicati...

Using fine-scale climate process, we investigated the relationship between extreme surface water runoff and property damages caused by flood in the U.S. Special attention was paid to disentangle effects of extreme weather and social wealth accumulation. We find it is still premature to claim that extreme weather events becomes more destructive due to anthropological climate change, if take into...

The influence of solar/geomagnetic activity on climate variables still remains a fully unclarified problem, although many scientific efforts have been made to better understand it. In order bring more information this open in the present study, we analyze connection between (predictors) and (predictands) by applying elements from theory wavelet transform analysis. solar was highlighted Wolf num...

As the lowest point in the surrounding landscape, lakes act as sensors in the landscape to provide insights into the response of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to climate change. Here a novel suite of climate forcing optical indices (CFOI) from lakes across North America is found to respond to changes in air temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation at timescales ranging from a s...

Globally, mediterranean-climate ecosystem vegetation has converged on an evergreen, sclerophyllous and shrubby growth form. The particular aspects of mediterranean-climate regions that contribute to this convergence include summer droughts and relatively nutrient-poor soils. We hypothesised that winter-precipitation implies stressful summer droughts and leaches soils due to greater water availa...