Focus on predictability

Tuesday, 6 December

Natural and socio-economic disasters pose an intolerable threat to society. The most damaging and least understood in this realm are so-called extreme events. In different contexts these events are also called critical transitions, disasters, or catastrophes. Among examples are destructive earthquakes, landslides, floods, droughts, El-Niños, heat waves, stock market crashes, political overturns, etc. The multidisciplinary research of the last decades reveals surprising similarity and structural universality in development of extreme events in systems of diverse origin. This session will review the state of the art and outline directions for future research in the science of forecasting extreme events. We welcome contributions on developing methodologies for risk assessments and forecasting extreme events, evaluation of their socio-economic impact, as well as designing the corresponding mitigation strategies. The goal is to share the knowledge among different diciplines and develop tools that can be used by disaster management authorities.

Conveners:
    -  Andrei Gabrielov (Purdue University, USA)
    -  Alik Ismail-Zadeh (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
    -  Donald Turcotte (University of California, Davis, USA)
    -  Ilya Zaliapin (University of Nevada, Reno, USA)

Invited Speakers:
Claude Allègre, Institut de Physique du Globe, Paris, France
Michael Ghil, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Harsh Gupta, National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India
Michael Intriligator, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Thomas Jordan, University of South California, Los Angeles, USA
Vladimir Kossobokov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
Seiya Uyeda, the Japan Academy, Tokyo, Japan

Monday, 5 December

Humans face natural hazards at different scales in time and space. The first decade of the century has been marked by a significant number of natural disasters, such as floods (eg in Europe, Pakistan, Australia); Katrina hurricane; cyclone Nargis; Kashmir, Sichuan, and Haiti large earthquakes; Sumatra and Tohoku great earthquakes and tsunamis; wildfires (eg in Australia, California, Russia). The session will overview the disaster cases, address major challenges in natural hazards and risk research, and try to answer the questions: What are the lessons scientists learned from the recent disasters? When do natural hazards turn to become disasters? How to integrate the knowledge from natural and social sciences to mitigate disasters?

Conveners:
    -  Alik Ismail-Zadeh (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
    -  Upmanu Lall (Columbia University, New York)
    -  Jane Rovins (International Program Office, Integrated Research on Disaster Risk, Beijing, China)
    -  Vasily Titov (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle)

Invited Speakers:
Peter Hoeppe (Munich Re, Numich, Germany)
Christopher Field (Carnegie Institute of Washington, Stanford, California, USA / IPCC)
Gordon McBean (University of Western Ontario, London, Canada / IRDR)
Kenji Satake (University of Tokyo, Japan)