Seminar: Melanie Weynants

Successions of drought and extreme precipitation events are frequent compound events that pose a wide range of threats to ecosystems, whether natural or managed, and to society as a whole. The severity of such impacts depends on the intensity of the cascading hazards, the exposure and vulnerability of the affected systems. In the project ARCEME (Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Extremes and Multi-hazard Events) funded by the European Space Agency, we ambition to leverage available high resolution Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 remote sensing data to improve our understanding of cascading droughts and extreme precipitation events and their impacts on society and vegetation. It is structured around three main objectives: (1) Produce a weather-based database of cascading droughts and extreme precipitation events having impacted society and / or on which to assess their effect on ecosystems. (2) Use high resolution Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 data, to characterize the identified natural disasters, understand their complex dynamics and interactions. (3) Develop analytical case studies at different scales, to operationalize the use of Earth observation (EO) data towards vulnerability assessment and disaster risk reduction. In this talk, I present the project's progress and our specific contributions.