EXPATS
Growing a new generation of scientists to face extreme precipitation and severe storms over the Alps
About
EXPATS (EXploiting sPAtiotemporal cloud patterns to advance severe Storms process understanding and detection) is a junior research group funded by the German Weather Service (DWD) within the IDEA-S4S network.
IDEA-S4S is a new bilateral collaboration between Germany and Italy in meteorology, climatology, and related disciplines that will create a center of excellence for cutting-edge research and translate the results into improving operational services and university training.
EXPATS lives in the time frame 2023-2027. It will develop new cutting-edge research on extreme precipitating events over the Alps, exploiting the high-resolution data provided by the new Meteosat third-generation satellite (MTG) data, and it will collaborate with DWD and ARPAE to bring research results as soon as possible to the operational weather services, and thus beneficial for the society.
Mission
In 2050, in Europe, we will spend 45 billion euros per year for damages caused by climate change and floods. Every degree of temperature increase on the Earth causes a rise between 4 and 8% in the intensity of precipitation extremes.
The Alps lay in the heart of Europe: there, where storms can cause landslides and flash floods, detecting storms is even more difficult because of the orography.
In EXPATS, we have a mission: to protect the European citizens and the environment by improving our capacity to predict and understand how extreme precipitation and hail events develop over the Alps. Our methods based on artificial intelligence will learn how storms evolve from geostationary satellite and weather radar continuous observations. Thanks to a strong synergy with weather services, the results of this research will serve numerical weather prediction models.
But EXPATS is more than new research only: we care to train fresh young minds that will strengthen the cooperation between Germany and Italy. We want to grow new generations of scientists that will face new climate change mitigation strategies for the future of all of us.
Partners
Istituto di Scienze
dell'Atmosfera e del Clima
Universita' di Bologna
Universität zu Köln
Talks and posters
DWD, 15 Jan 2023
Presenting the project
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
GSGS conference, 12 May 2023
Chatting about how extreme events form and the challenges we face in modelling and forecasting.
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
EUMETSAT conference, 11 Sep 2023
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
EUMETSAT invited talk, 11 Oct 2023
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
31 may 2023
Branding a research project: EXPATS
Author: Claudia Acquistapace
UNIVERSITY OF TRENTO, invited talk, 7 Mar 2024
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
ECMWF, invited talk, 2 Jul 2024
From the tropics to the Alps to look at precipitation
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
4th workshop on cloud organization, invited talk, 11 Jul 2024
Exploiting AI methods to get the mos out of multiscale observations
Speaker: Claudia Acquistapace
Teaching activities
INTRODUCTION TO SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING AND ML METHODS TO ANALYZE SATELLITE DATA
The lectures provide some basics on satellite remote sensing and give some tools to learn how to visualize data. It also introduces machine learning methods to analyze images and learn structures in the images.
Trento, Summer semester 2023
FEATURING AI METHODS APPLIED TO CLOUD
Description. We will talk about the potential of computer vision AI for advancing in the atmospheric field, starting from convolutional neural networks to more complex deep learning methods, introducing recent works with application to clouds and precipitation.
Module of classes for the Master in science of Climate, Uni Bologna, Winter semester 2023
Connect with us
Dr. Claudia Acquistapace
mail: cacquist@uni-koeln.de
Daniele Corradini
Paula Bigalke
mail: paula.bigalke@uni-koeln.de
mail: expats.ideas4s@gmail.com
Idea-s4s network page
DWD webpage
more about expats
