Modeling Climate Extremes for Impact Assessment
Intense and frequent climate extremes are causing unprecedented impacts on human and natural systems. For instance, extreme heat events are resulting in enormous stress on infrastructure such as the electric grid, human health impacts, and fueling wildfires. The impacts associated with climate extremes will likely continue to worsen with the projected increase in their severity in a warming climate. The extent and severity of these impacts make it crucial to understand their characteristics in historical and future climate. Earth system modeling tools are generally used to understand the characteristics of these climate extremes at global, national, and regional scales. This presentation will focus on the use of General Climate Models (GCMs), regional climate downscaling and data analysis tools to evaluate climate extremes in historical and future periods over the conterminous United States. Specifically, the focus will be on the development of high-resolution climate projections based on the latest suite of sixth Phase of Coupled Models Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) GCMs that can be subsequently used to understand the climate extremes and associated regional scale impacts.
Speaker:
Deeksha Rastogi
Deeksha Rastogi is a Research Scientist in Computational Urban Climate in Computational Science and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has over 12 years of experience working in the fields of atmospheric and climate sciences. She is responsible for conducting novel research to understand weather and climate extremes and associated impacts on natural systems and infrastructures such as energy, and human settlements at varying spatiotemporal scales. She utilizes a range of earth system modeling tools and scientific data analysis to achieve these objectives. She has contributed to the development of multiple high-resolution, physics-based climate datasets. So far, she has authored/coauthored a total of 20 peer reviewed journal articles, 3 datasets and 6 technical reports. She has peer reviewed over 50 articles for over 20 journals. She serves as a member of American Geophysical Union (AGU) and has convened and chaired sessions at AGU Fall Meetings since 2018.
