SORS: Assessing projected changes and prediction skill of hot and dry extremes over global land regions

Abstract: Climate extremes in recent years gained a lot of attention from governments, stakeholders and funding agencies worldwide given their destructive impacts on human societies, economies and ecosystems. Hot and dry extremes, for instance, are affected by natural climate variability and anthropogenic forcing, with the latter playing a significant role in exacerbating their frequency, intensity and duration. Such extremes can also interact, creating a compounding effect that can eventually generates more losses than the single hazards alone. It is therefore important to anticipate the occurrence of such events with skillful climate predictions.

Short Bio: Paolo is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. His research focusses on improving the multi-decadal prediction skill of univariate and compound hot and dry extremes over global land regions. Paolo started his career studying Environmental Science in Italy and then completed a NERC PhD in Physical Geography at Loughborough University (UK). Then he was visiting researcher at Uppsala University and before joining the BSC as researcher he moved to a postdoc position at VU Amsterdam. Paolo’s career is dedicated to the understanding of extreme meteorological phenomena, such as heatwaves, drought, extreme precipitation and storms. He uses different methods, from pragmatic to more complex dynamical systems approaches to disentangle the statistical characteristics, prediction skill and physical mechanisms driving such extremes. He is also conducting research on exoplanets’ mean and extreme climate. At present, he is visiting the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology where he is investigating multi-decadal prediction of compound hot-dry extremes.