Short Course in Climate Extremes and Risk Analysis

This Course is specifically tailored to the needs of PhD students, postdocs and professional researchers in climatology, ecology, environmental sciences, geosciences, meteorology or hydrology. We assume a basic knowledge in calculus and statistics, the rest you will learn here. You get the required statistical tools and extensive hands-on training to become able to optimally analyse your data and answer the associated questions about the climate. You acquire the theoretical basis for understanding the tools and interpreting the results. You learn to determine the various sources of uncertainty in data, climate models and statistical estimation. A highlight of this course will be the provision of a new software for optimally estimating the heavy tails of a statistical distribution (risk analysis).

Climate case studies serve to illustrate the usefulness of the tools: how to make the most of your data by means of statistics—and how to publish it in a research paper. Examples include:

(1) Dynamics of the Pliocene Northern Hemisphere Glaciation (Mudelsee and Raymo 2005 Paleoceanography 20:PA4022)

(2) Paleohurricane risk during the past millennium from proxy series (Besonen et al. 2008 Geophysical Research Letters 35:L14705)

(3) Modelled river runoff and river floods during the past decades and centuries (Mudelsee et al. 2003 Nature 425:166)

The course instructor, Dr. Manfred Mudelsee, trained in physics, geology and statistics, has a long-standing expertise in teaching statistical methods to non-specialists.

The course consists of lectures and extensive hands-on training in computer tutorials. Data, software (including the commercial risk analysis software Caliza ™, the lecture as PDF, the statistical tools and a printed copy of the textbook (Mudelsee, 2014, Climate Time Series Analysis, 2nd edition, Springer, 454 pp) are included.