EXPATS website

EXPATS

Growing a new generation of scientists to face extreme precipitation and severe storms over the Alps

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.

About

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.

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