Events Calendar

Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Auroop Gunguly, Associate Professor of CE Northeatern University, Boston

Talk Title: Climate Extremes Impacts on Critical Infrastructures and Key Resources

Abstract: Weather and hydrological extremes exhibit what has been called nonstationarity with deep uncertainty under the backdrop of natural climate variability and global climate change. Non stationary trends and patterns motivate fundamental changes in hazards preparedness, infrastructures operations, resource management, engineering design and sustainable planning. Deep uncertainties may be epistemic and aleatory, or inherent systemic variability, which challenge traditional design and planning principles based on likelihood based risks. Critical infrastructures and key resources, ranging from urban lifelines, global logistics chains, and coastal ecosystems, to hydraulic structures, and the water-energy nexus, are under increasing stress from climate extremes, as well as changes in population and economy. The growing interconnected nature of these systems may exacerbate their fragility to disruptions and change. Data, computational and network science methods offer innovative ways to characterize the robustness of these interdependent systems and develop effective restoration strategies. A quick summary of prior research by the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory (SDS Lab) of Northeastern University is presented. This includes intensifying heat waves together with persisting cold snaps, changes in design curves based on evolving statistics of precipitation extremes, meteorological droughts and wind extremes, coastal upwelling and ecosystems restoration, climate networks and teleconnections as well as sensor diagnostics and transportation security. Case studies in hazards resilience of transportation infrastructures and water stress on power production highlight how climate change acts as a threat multiplier and how data and network science can help guide adaptation and resilience.

Biography: uroop R. Ganguly is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Northeastern University in Boston since August 2011, where he directs the Sustainability and Data Sciences Laboratory. He has seven years experience at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, about five years at Oracle Corporation and a year at a best of breed startup subsequently acquired by Oracle, besides several years as visiting and joint faculty. He has published in Nature, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature's Scientific Reports and in journals related to climate change, water resources, nonlinear dynamics, civil and electrical engineering, supply chain, statistics and computer science. He has won multiple best paper awards at peer-reviewed computer science conferences and workshops, co-invented two (pending) patents, and published edited books on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data. He is an associate editor of AGU's Water Resources Research and the ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and on the editorial board of Nature's Scientific Reports.


Host: Dr. Kelly Sanders

Location: 200

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Evangeline Reyes