RICRI Research Seminar: Extreme Weather in the Warming Climate: from Physical Mechanism to Practical Solutions

Global warming stands as one of the most pressing challenges of the 21^st century, profoundly impacting societies worldwide. Recent years have seen unprecedented extreme weather events shatter long-standing records around the world, illustrating that our planet is entering a new era where such events are no longer exceptional, but part of a new normal.

In this seminar, Prof. PAN will first share her research about the underlying mechanism of extreme weather in the warming climate. Combining observations, climate dynamics theory, and climate modeling, she studies the “historical trend of atmospheric rivers in the Northern Hemisphere” and the “dry-hot season expansion of the Amazon rainforest under anthropogenetic climate change”.

Second, Prof. PAN will share her study about the infrastructure resilience in the warming world. Combining high-resolution climate model projections and numerical experiments, she quantified the potential risk of bridges due to unprecedented thermal expansion in the warming 21st century in the global domain. The result underscores the urgent need for policymakers and engineers to climate-proof critical infrastructure in the face of a changing climate.

By bridging climate science with civil engineering, this seminar aims to foster dialogue between researchers from different disciplines to address the shared challenges of a warming world.