Weather is everywhere. The weather has an impact on the earth surface, and on everything that is on that surface: vegetation, soil, water availability, humans, etc. Many natural hazards have extreme weather conditions and events as a trigger, like droughts, floods, heat-waves, and rainfall-induced landslides. For example, agricultural production is dependent on weather conditions, as extreme weather events, like a tropical cyclone, might cause irreversible damage to crop or to land, and lead to less harvest. Similarly, the extent and magnitude of the urban heat island effects are largest under hot, stable weather conditions, causing severe health impact. And, as global climate change poses huge challenges to society as these extreme weather conditions are increasing in severity and frequence, we have to understand the relation between weather and natural hazards.
Fortunately, the weather is continuously monitored worldwide, by satellites and ground stations at minute, daily or monthly scales. As well weather is observed in various meteorological parameters. Many meteorological datasets are freely accessible, being an enormously rich source for weather information. Long time series of these weather parameters allow us to build climate information services; how did the weather and extreme events change in the past? Similarly, the output of various climate models is freely accessible on a worldwide scale. When analyzing and visualising this weather and climate dataset, one gets insight into the various weather conditions and extreme events, that are potentially linked to natural hazards, now and in the future.
This course provides knowledge on weather data sources and tools to analyze the interaction between the weather and earth surface processes in time and space. The challenge will be to link this climatic information to non-meteorological data to learn how hazards might be changing under climate change conditions.