News

Award
Finalist: Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology
My idea "A system to quantify insurance premiums for extreme rainfall downpours" was among the three finalists of the Harry Otten Prize for Innovation in Meteorology. The idea is to combine near term forecasts with a physics-informed statistical model to develop an open source system able to predict the probability of extreme downpours from changes in wet-day temperature. I proposed a cooperation with insurance and reinsurance professionals to refine and validate the system.
Congrats to Assaf Shmuel for the deserved win!

Scientific publication
Doubling extreme summer rainfall in the Alps
In a new paper published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, we show that an average temperature increase of 2°C could double the frequency of short-duration summer thunderstorms in the Alpine region: what today happens every half-century could occur every 25 years in the future.

Award
Jim Dooge Award to the TENAX paper
Our paper "Predicting extreme sub-hourly precipitation intensification based on temperature shifts" has received the 2024 Jim Dooge Award from Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS) as one of the outstanding papers of the year.
In this paper, we introduce a new statistical model (TENAX) to predict changes in extreme sub-hourly precipitation using physical covariates.
Models
Weibull tail test
Atmospheric physics shows that extreme precipitation probability should approximately decrease as a powered-exponential as precipitation magnitude increases. These codes provide a Monte Carlo test to evaluate whether an available sample is likely drawn from a distribution with powered-exponential (Weibull) tail.
Non-stationary SMEV
Non-stationary implementation of the SMEV model. Maximum likelihood parameter estimation with left-censoring for a nonstationary two-parameter Weibull distribution in which both parameters (may) depend linearly on a covariate. Tests for the statistical significance of the dependences are provided.
