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Extreme Weather - Think global, act local

February 23, 2015

How can we protect our towns and cities from the devastation caused by extreme weather events? Can geo-engineering and other modern methods help? This week's guest on Tomorrow Today is meteorologist Uwe Ulbrich from Berlin's Free University.

https://p.dw.com/p/1EfG5

DW:
Uwe Ulbrich is playing a key role in a major European project about the complex interactions between weather events and land based infrastructure systems, called the RAIN-project. Mr. Ulbrich, could you tell us a little more about that?


Uwe Ulbrich:
This project is about protecting infrastructures in Europe. With respect to the rain aspect, we are trying to find out in how far the present-day and the future infrastructure protection is sufficient for the present-day and future rainfall. And, well, this is an issue we are trying to tackle.

It's all about estimating probability and risk. How can you really make plans, for, for example, for making changes to infrastructure, based solely on probabilities?

This is actually a challenge, because many people want to have exact numbers and exact predictions. But, meteorology is not like that. You have different pathways in how the weather and how climate can develop in the next years. And so, you have probabilities that you assign to the different pathways, and so you just want to make sure you are not too frequently flooded, for example, and you take this from all these model simulations that we have.



OK, so, these probability pathways then, they’re different. You’re looking at things at the European level. We’re talking about more impact at the local level. What’s the difference between those two things?

The European level - you have a very rough, say, grid, you have information that is not really specific for a village. But the village must protect itself for its local environment, and this can be different. And there is a technique called down-scaling that we apply, to go from the, say, global view to the localized view to make this possible.

But are there simple things that townships or cities – that they could do now, in terms of prevention, that could really make a difference?

There is a current challenge of many villages: there is the sewage systems that have to be rebuilt, because they are just too old now, and taking into account the present-day and future probabilities of heavy rain,so that the sewage systems can cope with that – this is really the way to go.

We're talking about what happens when the rain is actually on the ground. But there’s new technology in this field of geo-engineering, it’s called, which is about actually stopping the rain from falling at particular moments, or causing it to fall somewhere else. Tell us a little more about that.

Geo-engineering, there is two different aspects. The one is about climate, and the one is about localized rainfall or hail, for example. And the latter is actually taking place at certain places. They’re trying to make chemicals into clouds so that they prevent hail to develop and to fall at certain locations. The problem there that I see is that you could really produce hail that would not have happened, and the other thing is that you could harm other villages by this protection of the one. And who is paying the costs for that?

(Interview: Derrick Williams)

19.02.2015 DW Projekt Zukunft Uwe Ulbrich und Derrick Williams
Image: DW