News
Lab Announcements
- July 2021: Victor’s paper on surrogate modeling of uninsured flood risks in North Carolina is accepted in the Journal of Flood Risk Management. He presents the work virtually at the Natural Hazards Researchers Meeting. Congratulations Victor!
- May 2021: Sarah defends her thesis on design floods and graduates with Honors. Congratulations Sarah!
- May 2021: Lauren places in the top three in the poster competition at the 2021 Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference. Congratulations Lauren!
- April 2021: Victor presents his work on multi-hazard event severity metrics virtually at EGU.
- March 2021: Dr. Sebastian presents at the C-COAST Discipline’s 101 Seminar on compound flood events
- March 2021: Dr. Sebastian’s paper on modeling continuous flood hazards using random forest algorithms is published in Natural Hazards Earth Systems Science.
- February 2021: Hunter’s proposal is selected for funding by the North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI). Congratulations Hunter!
- January 2021: Dr. Sebastian writes a blog post describing the lab’s work on resilience with the NC Policy Collaboratory.
- January 2021: Dr. Sebastian receives a RJ Reynolds Foundation Junior Faculty Development Award to investigate flooding in the Neuse River Watershed
- December 2020: The lab attends AGU everywhere online. Victor gives an oral presentation on multi-hazard events. Sarah presents her poster on trends in design floods across the Southeastern US.
- September 2020: Dr. Sebastian’s paper Characterizing spatiotemporal trends in extreme precipitation in Southeast Texas is published in Springer Natural Hazards.
- August 2020: Lauren is selected as a fellow in the UNC Weiss Urban Livability Program. Congratulations Lauren!
- March 2020: Dr. Sebastian’s paper comparing floodplain evolution in channelized and unchannelized urban watersheds in Houston is published in the Journal of Flood Risk Management.
- December 2019: Dr. Sebastian is selected as part of the NSF Enabling Program 2019-2021 Cohort
- Fall 2019: The lab receives funding from the NC Legislature via the NC Policy Collaboratory to study flood resilience in Eastern North Carolina
Upcoming Events
- We will be co-convening two sessions at the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans December 13-17, 2019. The conference will take place in person and virtually. Conference abstracts due August 4, 2021.
- The next Extreme Value Analysis and Application to Natural Hazards (EVAN) Conference will take place at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL on May 17-19, 2022. For more information, you can check out the websites from past events Siegen, Santander, Southampton, and Paris.
Media
Our research sometimes attracts media attention, here are some examples:
- A $26-Billion Plan to Save the Houston Area from Rising Seas (Undark | June 14, 2021)
- Study: Climate change to blame for $8 billion of Hurricane Sandy damages (Grist | May 18, 2021)
- Natural bayou better when floods threaten Houston (Rice News | March 11, 2020)
- Property values plummeted and stayed down after Hurricane Ike (AGU | December 10, 2019)
- The Impact Of Flooding Depends More On Societal Change Than Climate Change (Forbes | November 5, 2019)
- The False Comfort of Higher Seawalls (The New Republic | October 29, 2019)
- Extreme Flooding from Florence Likely, Due to a Converge of Threats (Scientific American | September 12, 2018)
- Ever Heard of ‘Compound’ Disasters? It’s New to Experts, too (ClimateWire | July 3 2019)
- Flooding really was worse in the old days (The Times | May 29, 2018)
- Houston Speculators Make a Fast Buck from Storm’s Misery (The New York Times | March 23, 2018)
- Scientists Link Hurricane Harvey’s Record Rainfall to Climate Change (The New York Times | December 13, 2017)
- Climate change made Harvey’s 51 inches of rain 3 times more likely, scientists say (The Houston Chronicle | December 13, 2017) and this video from Rice Media
- Floods: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO | October 29, 2017)
- Decade of data shows FEMA flood maps missed 3 in 4 claims (Rice News | September 11, 2017)
Check out our research mentioned on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver at 7 minutes and 30 seconds!
Events Archive
- NH003. Concurrent, Consecutive and Cascading Events: An Emerging Challenge for Risk Assessment and Management of Compound Natural and Natech Hazards, AGU Fall Meeting, Online. December 1-17, 2020.
- GC027. Deep Learning for Climate Science and Extreme Weather Prediction, AGU Fall Meeting, Online. December 1-17, 2020.
- NH 11-B. Concurrent, Consecutive and Cascading Events: An Emerging Challenge for Risk Assessment and Management of Natural and Natech Hazards. AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA. December 9-13, 2019.
- GC43D. AI and Machine Learning for Climate and Extreme Weather Prediction. AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA. December 9-13, 2019.
- NH23A. Compound and Cascading Events: An Emerging Challenge for Natural Hazard Risk Assessment and Management. AGU Fall Meeting, San Francisco, CA. December 10-14, 2018.