Disaster Warning

The Amazon region is one of the ecosystems on the planet most affected by global climate change. The reason is variations in the Ecuador line cause events like floods, droughts and storms that directly affect the environment and the local population.

For volcanologists and seismologists Iceland is the world’s volcanic laboratory, where they try out new, data-intensive monitoring and early warning technologies, to help save lives and livelihoods in all parts of the world threatened by volcanic eruptions.

Leigh Orf from the University of Wisconsin-Madison leads a group of researchers specialised in re-creating meteorological events leading up to the forming of tornadoes. Built on real-world observational data, the computer simulations unveil the inner workings of these monstrous events in unprecedented detail.

While you can’t do anything to change the course of a typhoon moving towards you, you can take the necessary precautions before it reaches your shores - the earlier the better. So, you need to know your hazards, and that is why, in the wake of the catastrophic tropical storm Sendong in 2011, the Philippines started developing a complex early warning system.

As weather forecasts are becoming increasingly detailed, data volumes are increasing as well, demanding high-speed connectivity and supercomputing power.

The Indian summer monsoon is a manifestation of complex interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere and the simulation of its mean pattern and its variability on inter-annual scales is one of the challenging problems in climate studies. The correct prediction of this complex phenomenon is vital to national planning and economic policy making.

Understanding how the environment is altering through ongoing monitoring is key to coping with the effects of climate change. Working with European partners, the Central Asian Institute of Applied Geosciences (CAIAG) in Kyrgyzstan is able to monitor melting glaciers and mitigate the risks to the local population.

With extreme weather events increasingly hitting news headlines around the world, accurate and timely forecasts are essential for effective disaster warning and mitigation systems. This, in turn, calls for joint research efforts within the global meteorological community to improve models and tools for predicting severe weather, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, heat waves etc.

When the Latin American Observatory of Extraordinary Events announced in October 2011 that rainfall was expected to be above average for the South American Northwest and above average for the Southeast of the same region, an early alert for floods was issued for Panama, Colombia and Venezuela, and one of a drought for North-western Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. This is an example of how the information gathered and disseminated by the Observatory, a collaboration involving a number of institutions, helps Latin American nations with risk management for extreme environmental events.

Central Asia is under constant threat from its vulnerability to earthquakes. The region sits on the junction of two tectonic plates that have been colliding for millions of years, building mountains and causing earthquakes. CAREN – the Central Asia Research and Education Network – underpins international scientific efforts in the region to protect lives and to safeguard economic growth from the consequences.