Dr Upmanu Lall

My current research focuses on understanding and predicting the climate informed causal pathway for extreme storms and rainfall induced flooding as well as droughts at a global scale, and their linkage to dynamic risk assessment and mitigation considering the underlying climate dynamics and its organization at multiple time scales. The recent work in our group focuses on how jet stream dynamics, including Rossby Waves, relates to tropical and extratropical forcing and leads in turn to persistent blocks and troughs that translate into persistence in drought as well as sequences of tropical moisture exports and convergence into areas that then experience extreme precipitation and flooding. The application of these statistical dynamical models to financial and structural risk mitigation strategies covering large scale infrastructure such as a network of dams and levees and supply chains is of interest.