A 1 669 665 SEK grant from The European Research Council enhances our knowledge around extreme weather events

Gabriele Messori, Professor in Meteorology has received a so called ”Proof of Concept Grant” from The European Research Council, (ERC).

The ERC's Proof of Concept Grant is a complementary funding to an already existing ERC project. In this case the funding amounts to 150 000 EUR (1 669 665 SEK) and the project will continue for 18 months.

- This project entails automated analysis of large volumes of texts, in order to obtain detailed information about the effect of different categories of extreme weather events. The major portion of the work is about gathering of information, says Gabriele Messori. 

Synopsis
Climate extremes have multifarious detrimental impacts on human activities and ecosystems. Notwithstanding this, the publicly available data on the impacts of many climate extremes is poor. This hinders scientific and practical progress in understanding climate extremes and working to minimise their impacts. In this project I aim to leverage text-mining of freely available online sources to quantify the impacts of wintertime cold spells in North America and windstorms and heavy precipitation in Europe – extreme events which I have studied extensively in my ongoing ERC project. This effort supports the recent EU strategy on adaptation to climate change that explicitly seeks to “gather more and better data on climate-related risks and losses” as a key adaptation tool. The aim of the project is therefore very practically-oriented, and it seeks to be a proof of concept for building future, improved databases of impacts of climate extremes.

Read the full article in English under the University´s news:
"ERC grant for research into extreme weather". 

For more information contact Gabriele Messori
E-mail: gabriele.messori@geo.uu.se
Telephone: 018-471 2588