Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
Environmental Engineering Program
Invite you to join us for the
ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SPRING 2017 COLLOQUIUM SERIES
Friday, March 3, 2017 • 12:15 PM
F.L. Castleman, Room 212
“A Framework for Climate-Resilient Designs: Translating Extreme Precipitation Data from Climate Change Projections into Engineering Applications”
By
Constantinos Samaras, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Carnegie Mellon University
Bio:
Costa Samaras is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. His research spans energy, climate change, infrastructure, and defense analysis and he teaches courses on energy analysis and climate adaptation for infrastructure. He has was one of the Lead Authors of the American Society of Civil Engineers book “Adapting Infrastructure and Civil Engineering Practice to a Changing Climate” and serves on the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate. Costa directs the Center for Engineering and Resilience for Climate Adaptation, is an affiliated faculty member in both the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and the Energy Science, Technology and Policy Program, and he is an Adjunct Senior Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Costa He previously was a Senior Engineer at the RAND Corporation and an Engineer for Parsons Brinckerhoff. Costa received a joint Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy and from Carnegie Mellon, a M.P.A. in Public Policy from New York University, and a B.S. from Bucknell University.
Abstract:
Engineers generally use historical precipitation trends to inform assumptions and parameters for long-lived infrastructure designs and resiliency assessments. However, current engineering practice must be adjusted to incorporate a range of future climate conditions that are likely to be different than the past. A challenge for engineers is the relative probabilities of which future to design for are unknown, as are the definitions and thresholds of success for resilient designs. In addition, there remains a considerable mismatch between climate model outputs and the inputs needed in the engineering community to incorporate climate resiliency. These include differences in temporal and spatial scales, model uncertainties, and a lack of criteria for selection of an ensemble of models. This talk addresses the limitations to working with climate data by providing a framework for the use of publicly available downscaled climate projections to inform engineering resiliency. The framework consists of: (1) selecting the data source based on the engineering application, (2) extracting the data at a specific location, (3) validating for performance against observed data, (4) post-processing for bias or scale, and (5) selecting the ensemble and calculating statistics. We will illustrate the framework with an example application to extreme precipitation-frequency statistics using four publically available climate data sources: NARCCAP, USGS, Reclamation, and MACA. We will discuss recommendations for engineers and stakeholders for a path forward on climate-resilient designs.
For more information, contact: Tiffiny Thibodeau at tiffiny.thibodeau@uconn.edu