Participant Testimonials

Jun 12 - Jun 17, 2016

This was a valuable meeting and I thank BIRS for hosting it. The treatment of extreme events is of huge interest in the climate science community, driven by the idea that the most significant impacts of global warming will be found in the increased frequency or intensity of extremes. However, there has been relatively little engagement of the statistics research community in this enterprise. Meetings like this one help a great deal to further those interactions. From a personal research perspective, it was very useful to me to hear both from meteorologists about how they formulate and address the questions of weather extremes (e.g. the talks by Erich Fischer and Hayley Fowler on extreme precipitation) and from methodological statisticians, such as Raphael Huser and Brian Reich, about new approaches to spatial extremes. I had several opportunities for conversations with my research collaborator Michael Wehner and it is likely that within the next few months we will submit the following paper: R.L. Smith and M. Wehner, Influence of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Events. This paper has been in preparation for some time but was advanced by our discussions during the workshop. You have a wonderful system for taking videos automatically and broadcasting them almost immediately. I wish we could get something like that set up at SAMSI! I know the NSF team were impressed when they visited last year.

Richard Smith University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

This was a valuable meeting and I thank BIRS for hosting it. The treatment of extreme events is of huge interest in the climate science community, driven by the idea that the most significant impacts of global warming will be found in the increased frequency or intensity of extremes. However, there has been relatively little engagement of the statistics research community in this enterprise. Meetings like this one help a great deal to further those interactions. From a personal research perspective, it was very useful to me to hear both from meteorologists about how they formulate and address the questions of weather extremes (e.g. the talks by Erich Fischer and Hayley Fowler on extreme precipitation) and from methodological statisticians, such as Raphael Huser and Brian Reich, about new approaches to spatial extremes. I had several opportunities for conversations with my research collaborator Michael Wehner and it is likely that within the next few months we will submit the following paper: R.L. Smith and M. Wehner, Influence of Climate Change on Extreme Weather Events. This paper has been in preparation for some time but was advanced by our discussions during the workshop. I would like to make two broader comments about BIRS. First, you have a wonderful system for taking videos automatically and broadcasting them almost immediately. I wish we could get something like that set up at SAMSI! I know the NSF team were impressed when they visited last year.

Richard Smith University of North Carolina Chapel Hill