| Wanneer | 5 juni 2025, aanvang 15:30 |
|---|---|
| Waar | Buys Ballotzaal, KNMI, De Bilt |
Dr. Katharina Lengfeld works at the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst DWD) in the Department of Hydrometeorology
One of the predicted effects of climate change in Central Europe is a growing number and increasing extremity of heavy rainfalls. Thus, it is of a great importance to investigate the structure and detailed characteristics of extreme events that have already taken place as well as their impact.
With this objective, the German Weather Service (DWD) has developed a Catalogue of Radar-based Heavy Rainfall Events (CatRaRE), derived from 24 years of climatological radar data (RADKLIM) for the area of Germany.
Using hourly data of about 1 km spatial resolution, an object-oriented analysis is performed to classify spatially and timely independent rainfall events with durations between 1 and 72 hours exceeding the official warning level for heavy precipitation for Germany. Apart from various extremity attributes, like return period or weather extremity indices, the catalogue is enriched with additional variables (e.g. weather type, antecedent precipitation index, population density, land cover, imperviousness degree, topographic position index), providing the meteorological, geographical and demographic background. Combining CatRaRE with information on the impact of each event (e.g. on damage or fire brigade operations) allows an estimation of the possible impact upcoming events with comparable structure could provoke in a similar environment.
In this seminar the two datasets RADKLIM and CatRaRE will be introduced. The results of a comprehensive analysis of all classified heavy precipitation events will be presented as well as first attempts to use the data set as a basis for assessing the impact of predicted precipitation from nowcasting.
Bio:
Dr. Katharina Lengfeld works at the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst DWD) in the Department of Hydrometeorology since 2017. She works on climatological analysis and application of precipitation observations from DWD’s weather radar network with a focus on extreme precipitation events. She is a visiting scientist at KNMI for six weeks in the framework of the DWD program GO INT that was launched last year to enhance international collaboration.
She studied marine meteorology at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, Germany. The topic of her diploma thesis was the parameterisation of incoming solar radiation from models and observations. During her diploma she participated as a student worker in several research cruises in the Atlantic Ocean observing meteorological parameters. She completed her doctorate at the University of Hamburg with a focus on assessing near surface variability with a wireless sensor network on the small scale. After finishing her PhD she focussed on weather radar observations, starting with a local network of high-resolution X-band radars in the urban area of Hamburg. Between 2015 and 2017 she was awarded a research fellowship of the German Research Foundation to improve the quality of X-band radar measurements at the Politechnical University in Barcelona, Spain.