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STOR Colloquium: Richard Smith, UNC-CH
27 Aug @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
The Department of
Statistics and Operations Research
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
STOR Colloquium
Monday, August 27th, 2018
120 Hanes Hall
3:30pm
Richard Smith
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
The First Anniversary of Hurricane Harvey
This weekend marks exactly one year since Hurricane Harvey devastated much of the Caribbean and then dumped record levels of rainfall on the city of Houston and its environs. This event also stimulated much scientific work focused on two major issues of a statistical nature, (a) trying to assess just how extreme the Harvey rainfalls were, and (b) assessing to what extent the extremeness of Harvey could be attributed to anthropogenic climate change, and the related question of how common such events are likely to be in the future. In joint work with Ken Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute of Climate Studies, I have fitted extreme value models to extreme precipitation events in the southeast US and have linked these both to increasing temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and to global levels of carbon dioxide, both of which have anthropogenic origins. To complement these applied topics, I will also review more theoretical developments stimulated by similar problems. These are (i) extreme value theory for spatial processes, (b) the statistical theory surrounding the detection and attribution of anthropogenic signals in both observed and model-generated climate data.
Refreshments will be served at 3:00pm in the 3rd floor lounge of Hanes Hall