Understanding river floods from data: help me to do it smartly

Presenter: Alberto Viglione
Wednesday, April 6th, 2022 17:00
Location: SmartData@Covivio

Flood-related economic losses have increased dramatically over the past decades in most parts of the world, and are expected to increase in the future due to climate dynamics and increasing exposure. From a practical perspective, it is of interest to estimate the probability of river flood events happening at a certain location or region. From a theoretical perspective, it is of interest to understand how the flood hazard depends on the causal mechanisms and dominant processes in the atmosphere, catchment, and river systems. For both perspectives, information is extracted from data at different spatial scales, from a few square kilometers to continents, and temporal scales, from events of a few hours to centuries. In this talk, I will present to the SmartData community examples from my own research with the aim of getting hints on how novel techniques could maximise the amount of information retrieved from hydrologic data.

Biography: Alberto Viglione is an hydrologist, Associate Professor at the DIATI – Polito since 2019. He graduated in 2002 in Environmental Engineering and he got his Ph.D. in Hydraulic Engineering in 2007, at Polito. In the years 2007 to 2018, he worked as Research Fellow at the Vienna University of Technology in the field of “Flood Hydrology”. His research is focused on (a) understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of climatic, hydrologic, and human processes in river basins; (b) deciphering the implications of these dynamics on the probabilities of extreme hydrological events (floods and droughts) and their evolution in space and time; and (c) assessing the risk associated to extreme hydrological events.

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