Focus on North America and Europe

The ENHANS Symposium "Extreme Natural Events: Modeling, Prediction and Mitigation" was held at the AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco on 13 December 2010.

Co-organizers:
Alik Ismail-Zadeh, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany
Ilya Zaliapin, University of Nevada, Reno, USA
Surjalal Sharma, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA

This symposium discussed theories and methodologies for understanding, modeling, and predicting extreme events in complex natural and socio-economic systems. Oral and poster contributions presented developments in methodologies for probabilistic assessments and forecasting extreme events, evaluation of their socio-economic impact, design of corresponding mitigation strategies, as well as case studies that report successes or failures of the proposed methods. The detailed report is here

Invited speakers:

  • Daniel Baker (Colorado University at Boulder, USA) "Predicting and mitigating impacts of extreme space weather"
  • Rowan Douglas (Willis Research Network) "Connecting Capital and Catastrophe in a Modeled World - How re/insurance and public science interact to manage risk for societal benefit"
  • Fausto Guzzetti (CNR, Italy) "Landslide hazard, vulnerability and risk assessment: methods, limits and challenges"
  • Greg Holland (NCAR, Boulder, USA) "Application of Extreme Value Theory to Diagnosing High Impact Weather from Climate Models".
  • Tom Jordan (University fo South California, USA) "From M8 to CyberShake: Using Large-Scale Numerical Simulations to Forecast Earthquake Ground Motions"
  • Upmanu Lall (Columbia University, USA) "2010: Why is it flooding everywhere this year? Coincidence or a predictable climate phenomenon, and how can we respond?"
  • Ning Lin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA) "Hurricane Risk Assessment: Wind Damage and Storm Surge"
  • Kenji Satake (University of Tokyo, Japan) "Tsunami Modeling, Forecast and Warning"
  • Steve Sparks (University of Bristol, UK) "Extreme Volcanic Eruptions: return periods, impact and implications"
  • Hans von Storch (University of Hamburg, Germany) "Storm surges - a globally distributed risk, and the case of Hamburg"