About

I am an early career scientist working on compound weather and climate extremes. Specifically, in my current position as a research associate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes (CLEX) I am focusing on compound weather and climate events – high-impact events caused by multiple hazards and/or drivers acting together to aggravate consequences relative to if the individual perils occurred alone. For this I am using multivariate statistics, simulations of the past, present and future climate by global climate models and many types of global observations to build a robust  methodology to assess the occurrence of compound events. High-quality observations and reanalysis products to build the foundation of my work. I develop a skill metric to determine the performance of state-of-the-art climate models in replicating past compound event frequencies.

In my previous position at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) I investigated coincidences of storm surges along the Dutch coast with heavy precipitation and/or high river discharge events in course of the NWO project ‘Impacted by Coincident Weather Extremes‘ (ICOWEX). For this I used a 2D numerical storm surge model of the North Sea basin (WAQUA/DCSMv5) forced with ERA-Interim reanalysis data, output from the HBV hydrological model and observed precipitation (EOBS). Specifically, I explored the influence of atmospheric rivers (ARs) on compound events consisting of high storm surges and strong precipitation along the Dutch coast, and thus coastal flood risk in the Netherlands.

By organising national workshops and meetings inviting researchers from other institutions, I helped to foster collaborations, encourage knowledge transfer between research groups and eventually build a network of scientists engaging in compound events research in the Netherlands.

Further, I was involved in the development of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) software for data analysis from climate models, where I designed a tool to infer local water levels from mean sea level pressure fields without the direct application of a storm surge model.

With KNMI being one of the external partners of the Marie-Skłodowska-Curie European Training Network SYSTEM RISK, I was entrusted with the co-supervision of one of the network’s PhD students.

For a full CV and a list of publications please refer to the Curriculum Vitae page of this website.