Date: 27th Sep 2023, Wednesday (4:00 – 5:00pm)
Presenter: Andrew Kruczkiewicz (IRI)
Topic: Compound extremes in humanitarian contexts: Understanding, managing and preparing for current and future extreme climate and weather events

Abstract:
Increasingly, we face compounding and interrelated environmental, socioeconomic, and political crises. Yet our approaches to these problems are often siloed, fragmented, and inadequate. We are at a critical juncture, faced with a need and responsibility to redesign institutions to be proactive, agile, and socially just when confronted with increasingly likely compound risks. However, new data and technology will not only solve these challenges and could in some cases be creating more challenges than benefit. Assuming the integration of new data improves the current state of decision making represents a privileged view of responsibility, mandates and accountability – elements that will be increasingly vague as humanitarian situations become more complex and protracted. This talk presents examples of these challenges, creating space for discussion on opportunities to improve the translation and integration of climate, social and environmental data within humanitarian operations.

Speaker Profile:
Andrew Kruczkiewicz is faculty lecturer in the Columbia Climate School’s Climate and Society graduate program and is Co-Director of the Climate School Network: Sustainable and Resilient Living in an Era of Increasing Disasters. He has more than 10 years of experience working with the humanitarian, development and disaster management sectors, including Red Cross, World Food Programme and World Bank, designing early warning systems, impact-based forecasting standard operating procedures and contributing to the design of global climate policy. Andrew conducts research on extreme weather and climate events focusing on both individual hazards, such as cyclones, floods and other hydrometeorological hazards, as well as compound events. He is involved in the application of climate and weather data including forecasting, risk assessment and integration within policy and decision making. Andrew is Principal Investigator of NASA funded research project: Towards A Global Flood & Flash Flood Early Warning Early Action System Driven by NASA Earth Observations, which seeks to increase the ability to forecast various types of floods, including flash floods, and inform early warning and early action standard operating procedures. Andrew serves on numerous national and international task forces and committees, including the World Meteorological Organization Task Team on ENSO Information, and the UN OCHA IASC Early Warning Analysis Cell. He frequently appears on national and international television, radio, and in print.

Date: 4th Oct 2023, Wednesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Xiaogang He (NUS)
Topic: Building a Climate Intelligent Singapore to Withstand Future Hydrological Extremes

Abstract:
Hydrological extremes, in the form of droughts and floods, have huge impacts on a wide range of sectors including, most prominently, water availability, food security, and energy production, among others. The expectation of heightened drought and flood risk in Singapore under climate change, coupled with economic development, poses unprecedented challenges for the nation to boost its resilience to these natural hazards, mitigate their extreme impact, and develop effective and actionable solutions towards sustainable development. In this seminar, I will introduce the SgCALE (Singapore’s Climate ArtificiaL intelligence Engine) platform to showcase how we can harness the power of AI to improve our scientific understanding of Singapore’s hydroclimate extremes, especially the drivers, risks, and physical plausibility of very rare droughts (for example, those with return periods over 10000 years).

Speaker Profile:
Xiaogang He is an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Dr. He is a Princeton-trained Ph.D. Hydrologist with experience in economics, machine learning, and environmental policy. His research interests focus on the fundamental understanding of how climate change, variability, and human interventions affect drought and flood risk across scales, and how to implement an integrative framework (e.g., Earth System Models, Integrated Assessment Models, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, multi-benefit spatial optimization, nexus approaches) to reduce their societal impacts on the interlinked water-food-energy sectors. Before joining NUS, Dr. He was a Water in the West Postdoc Fellow at Stanford University working on sustainable groundwater management. Dr. He has published more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature Communications (2019), Science Advances (2021, 2022), and Nature Water (2023) as the lead and/or corresponding author. Dr. He’s research has gained lots of media attention, including Bloomberg, USA Today, The Straits Times, CNA, KQED, The Hill, Grist, EurekAlert!, Science Daily and many others.
Dr. He has received a number of accolades including the 2020 Editors’ Citation for Excellence Award from American Geophysical Union (AGU), Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy (STEP) fellowship from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton Energy and Climate Scholars (PECS) and Mary and Randall Hack ’69 Award from Princeton Environmental Institute, and the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) fellowship from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). His Ph.D. research achievement has been recognized by the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) Award for Excellence, which is given to SEAS advanced graduate students who have performed at the highest level as scholars and researchers at Princeton. Most recently in 2023, Dr. He received the inaugural Outstanding Early Career Award from the College of Design and Engineering at NUS.
Dr. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Integrative Environmental Science and has served as a reviewer for more than 20 journals, including Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Food, Nature Water, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Science Advances, Geophysical Research Letters, and Water Resources Research. Dr. He received his M.A. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2016; M.E. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2013; B.Eng (Major, with honors) in Hydraulic Engineering, and B.Sc (Dual) in School of Economics and Management from Tsinghua University, China, in 2011.

Date: 11th Oct 2023, Wednesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Jie Zhang (CMA)
Topic: Constraint on regional land surface air temperature projections in CMIP6 multi-model ensemble

Abstract:
The reliability of the near-land-surface air temperature (LSAT) projections from the state-of-the-art climate-system models that participated in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase six (CMIP6) is debatable, particularly on regional scales. Here we introduce a method of constructing a constrained multi-model-ensemble (CMME), based on rejecting models that fail to reproduce observed LSAT trends. We use the CMME to constrain future LSAT projections under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 5-8.5 (SSP5-8.5) and 2-4.5 (SSP2-4.5), representing the high and intermediate scenarios. In comparison with the “raw” (unconstrained) CMIP6 multi-model ensemble (MME) mean, the impact of the observation-based constraint is less than 0.05oC 100years-1 at a global scale over the second half of 21st century. However, the regional results show a wider range of positive and negative adjustments, from -1.0oC 100years-1 to 1oC 100years-1 under the SSP5-8.5 scenario. Although amplitude under SSP2-4.5 is relatively smaller, the CMME adjustment is similar to that under SSP5-8.5, indicating the scenario independency of the CMME impact. The ideal 1pctCO2 experiment suggests that the response of LSAT to carbon dioxide (CO2) forcing on regional scales is responsible for the MME biases in the historical period, implying the high reliability of CMME in the 21st century projections. The advantage of CMME is that it goes beyond the idea of “model democracy” assumed in MME. The unconstrained CMIP6 MME may be overestimating the risks of future warming over North America, but underestimating the risks over Asia.

Speaker Profile:
Dr. Jie Zhang works in Earth System Modeling and Prediction Centre in China Metrological Administration (CMA). She is a major contributor to the development of BCC-CSM climate system model and BCC-ESM Earth system model. Her recent research mainly focused on Earth system model evaluation, especially the systematic cooling biases in CMIP6 Earth system models and the relative aerosol forcing. She is also interested in the diagnosis and evaluation on climate simulations and projections, especially over East Asia. She was awarded the title of Youth Meteorological Talent in the High-level scientific and technological innovation talent plan by China Metrological Administration.

Date: 18th Oct 2023, Wednesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Guangxing Lin (IAP)
Topic: Improving mesoscale convective systems in E3SM with a multi-scale modeling framework

Abstract:
Large thunderstorms called mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) are significant contributors to heavy precipitation and flooding worldwide. They change climate not only by changing the Earth’s water cycle but also by releasing large amounts of latent heat in the atmosphere to alter large-scale circulations. Thus, accurately representing MCSs is crucial for simulating the water and energy cycles in global climate models (GCMs). However, MCSs pose a great challenge for GCMs in no small part due to the multiscale nature of the physics and dynamics, confounding conventional convection parameterizations used in traditional GCMs. As a result, traditional GCMs, including E3SM, have a common long-standing issue of being unable to simulate midlatitude warm-season MCSs. Usually, they show a persistent summer warm and dry bias over mid-latitudes. We thus use an alternative approach, known as the multi-scale modeling framework (MMF), or super-parameterization, to improve the MCS simulations in E3SM. In this talk, I will briefly describe the development of the MMF version of E3SM (E3SM-MMF) and its application to modeling MCSs. I will then demonstrate how and why it can improve the MCS simulations.

Speaker Profile:
Guangxing Lin is a research scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China. Dr. Lin completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying atmospheric organic aerosols and their radiative effect. Before joining IAP, he spent several years in the Division of Atmospheric Sciences and Global Change at Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL), USA, as a post-doctoral researcher and Earth Scientist. Dr. Lin’s primary research interests are atmospheric aerosol physics and chemistry, aerosol-cloud-climate interactions, and earth system model development and application.

Date: 25th Oct 2023, Wednesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Khairunnisa Yahya (CCRS)
Topic: Environmental Monitoring and Modelling in the Clean Environment Group (CEG)

Abstract:
The Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Division (EMMD) within the Clean Environment Group (CEG) carries out air, water and soil quality monitoring and sampling, as well as air and water quality modelling and research to support NEA’s policy and operations. The presentation will cover the various environmental monitoring and sampling programmes including EMMD’s sensor networks, as well as current and past research undertaken by EMMD and through collaborations with research/academic institutions.

Speakers Profiles:
Khairunnisa Yahya was previously from the Environmental Quality Monitoring Department (EQMD) under the Environmental Monitoring and Modelling Division (EMMD), overseeing both the Air Quality Monitoring and the Water and Soil Quality Monitoring Branches in EMMD. She holds a PhD in Atmospheric Science from the North Carolina State University, specializing in Air Quality Modelling. As part of building stronger cross pillar collaboration and capability building in air quality modelling, prediction and research, she is currently doing a 2-year attachment with the Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling Branch under DWR.

Date: 1st Nov 2023, Wednesday (11:00am – 12:00pm)
Presenter: Peter Heng (MSS)
Topic: Takeaways from the WCSSP SE Asia Regional Science Workshop

Abstract:
The Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership Southeast Asia (WCSSP SE Asia) is a collaborative initiative between research institutes in the UK and the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam that aims at advancing the understanding of high-impact weather over the region, developing global and regional forecasting systems to better predict these events, and improving how forecasts are translated into warnings and advice. The WCSSP SE Asia Regional Workshop held in Hanoi, Vietnam from 16 to 18 May brought together scientists and forecasters from across the partnership to exchange knowledge and experience on weather phenomena affecting SE Asia, the fidelity of model forecasts, and the communication of forecasts and warnings. This talk will highlight some of the work under this initiative that may be of interest to MSS.

Speakers Profiles:
Peter Heng is a Senior Meteorologist in the Weather Services Division in MSS. His interests are in NWP model evaluation, forecast verification and forecast product development.