Harleman Lecture at Penn State - Prof. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, NAE

[Roberto Fernández]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Dear colleagues, 

Penn State annually hosts the Harleman Lecture to honor Dr. Donald R.F. Harleman (B.S., PSU, 1943), who distinguished himself in the fields of hydraulics and environmental engineering as a student and as a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1945 through 1991, when he retired as professor emeritus. Dr. Harleman was awarded the Penn State Outstanding Alumni Award in 1979 and was named a Penn State Alumni Fellow in 1987. This lecture, first held in 2002, is intended to enrich the faculty and students in the Water Resources Engineering area of Penn State's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, but also the broader community. The Harleman lecture seeks to provide contact with outstanding researchers and practitioners in the fields of environmental fluid mechanics, hydrology, and water resources engineering. This year, our Harleman Distinguished Lecturer is Prof. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, NAE. If you wish to join the lecture, the details are provided in the attached flyer and the image below. For those of you interested in joining online, please register through the following link: https://bit.ly/harleman23-PSU. For those of you who are able to attend in person, the lecture will take place in room 101 of Thomas Building (Joab L. Thomas Bldg, 16802 Shortlidge Rd, State College, PA 16802).

Harleman Lecture - Wednesday November 01 at 16:45 in State College, Pennsylvania - GMT-04 (13:45 San Francisco; 20:45 London; 22:45 Johannesburg; Thursday November 02 02:30 New Delhi; 04:45 Beijing; 07:45 Sydney)

Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: Harleman Lecture - Penn State University. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting. Prof. Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, NAE Distinguished Professor and the Samueli Endowed Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in Earth Science University of California Irvine Talk Title: Precipitation in the Earth’s system: Global estimation from space, subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction and climate change Talk Abstract: Precipitation is the input to the hydrologic cycle and a critical component of water availability and sustainability studies at the local to regional to global scales. Yet, precipitation is one of the most difficult variables to accurately measure from space globally, and difficult to predict at the sub-seasonal to seasonal scales. Climate change is also accelerating the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation, changing its seasonality and interannual variability, with impacts for hazard prediction and water resources management and planning. In this talk, I will summarize our work on global precipitation estimation from multi-satellite platforms, with emphasi bit.ly

Title: Precipitation in the Earth’s system: Global estimation from space, subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction and climate change.

Abstract: Precipitation is the input to the hydrologic cycle and a critical component of water availability and sustainability studies at the local to regional to global scales. Yet, precipitation is one of the most difficult variables to accurately measure from space globally, and difficult to predict at the sub-seasonal to seasonal scales. Climate change is also accelerating the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation, changing its seasonality and interannual variability, with impacts for hazard prediction and water resources management and planning. In this talk, I will summarize our work on global precipitation estimation from multi-satellite platforms, with emphasis on diagnosing biases and uncertainties in current global precipitation products towards improving precipitation retrievals at space-time scales relevant for hydrologic studies. This work includes innovative metrics for model evaluation, spectral error models for uncertainty quantification, and construction of appropriate loss functions for training the new class of ML algorithms guided to preserve extremes and the multi-scale patterns of precipitation systems. I will also review our work on extracting from climate models changes in large-scale tropical patterns affecting precipitation in many parts of the world (e.g., ITCZ and MJO), and how seasonal predictability of precipitation might be changing in the future due both to increased natural variability and changes in synoptic-scale systems. A glance of our work on landscapes, such as coastal river deltas and post-fire hazards will be “scanned” quickly but not discussed.

Bio: Efi Foufoula-Georgiou is a Distinguished Professor and the Samueli Endowed Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is also the Associate Dean for Research in the Samueli School of Engineering. From 1989-2016 she was a McKnight Distinguished Professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Director of the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, and Director of the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics. Foufoula-Georgiou studies hydrology and geomorphology with an emphasis on understanding the space-time organization and multiscale structure of precipitation and landforms for improving modeling and prediction. She has served the community in several capacities, including President of the Hydrology Section of AGU, chair of the Board of Directors of CUAHSI, Trustee of UCAR, and Councilor of AMS. Her work has been recognized by several awards including the EGU John Dalton Medal, AGU Hydrologic Sciences Award, AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal, and AGU Robert Horton Medal. She received a diploma in Civil Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1985) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is a fellow of AGU, AMS, AAAS, fellow of the American Society of Arts and Sciences, and member of the European Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Regards,  

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Roberto Fernández, PhD (he/él)

Assistant Professor
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Institute of Energy and the Environment Faculty Member

Penn State University

Associate Editor

Geomorphica (www.geomorphica.org)

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