From 1 August 2018, I will be moving to the University of Oxford to take up a new position as Associate professor in physical geography in the School of Geography and the Environment (in association with Hertford College).
We’re delighted to announce that the ‘Using R in Hydrology’ workshop will be running again (for a second year) at EGU 2018!
The session is organised in cooperation with the Young Hydrologic Society (YHS) and materials will be made available on the YHS GitHub page (rhydro_EGU18).
Convener: Louise Slater
Co-Conveners: Shaun Harrigan, Claudia Vitolo, Tobias Gauster, Alexander Hurley, Guillaume Thirel.
The session is aimed at researchers who are interested in hearing more about R as well as those who are advanced R programmers wanting to discuss recent developments in an open environment.
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2018/session/28914
Our two-day workshop in Loughborough on Seasonal Forecasting of Water Resources – Meeting User Needs (24-25 January) was attended by 43 participants from a diverse range of organisations (CEH, ECMWF, EA, SEPA, NRW, NCAS, National Farmers’ Union, Canal & River Trust, SMHI, Civil Protection Agency), water agencies/ consultancies (Anglian Water Services, Scottish Water, CH2M, South West Water Ltd), and universities (Maynooth, Reading, Coventry, Loughborough, Colima, Newcastle, West of England, WSL), with delegates from six countries (UK, Ireland, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden). The event was co-sponsored by the RCUK Drought Programme, Water@Loughborough, Water@Reading, and the British Hydrological Society.
We are planning to write a summary of the meeting for the British Hydrological Society’s newsletter Circulation, a Letter to NERC, and an opinion paper.
For more pictures of the event, please see the #SeasonalForecasting hashtag on Twitter!
We have just heard that our NERC/ESRC/DFID proposal on ‘Financial planning for natural disasters: the case of flood risk in Central Java’ was successful.
We will soon be advertising a two-year senior Research Associate (Postdoctoral) position to work on Flood risk and Financial planning (with me), starting early in 2018. Please do get in touch if you are interested. Advanced programming (R or Python) and GIS skills strongly desirable!
A workshop on ‘Seasonal forecasting: Meeting User Needs’ is being held on 24th-25th January 2018 at Loughborough University (UK), co-sponsored by the British Hydrological Society, the RCUK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme, Water @ Loughborough, and Water @ Reading.
The aim of this workshop is to focus on the seasonal forecast needs of users and practitioners, and to identify ways of improving the dissemination, uptake and operationalisation of seasonal forecasts by the water and agricultural sectors.
Confirmed speakers include:
Abstract submission: Abstracts for oral and poster presentations are welcomed. Please send your abstract (up to 300 words) including title, authors and affiliations to SeasonalForecasting@lboro.ac.uk by Friday 15th December 2017.
For more information, please email: SeasonalForecasting@lboro.ac.uk
Further details/registration: https://www.ice.org.uk/events/seasonal-forecasting-meeting-user-needs
Two research grants from Loughborough University, from the Institute of Advanced Studies and the SSPGS Seedcorn fund, totalling almost £5K, will enable me to purse research on the Predictability of hydrometeorological extremes using remotely-sensed data. (Thank you Loughborough!) Further details to come.
Two new NERC-funded PhD positions starting in 2018 are available with me and colleagues at Loughborough University, as part of the CENTA Doctoral Training Programme.
Applications for 2018 entry are now live. Further details on how to apply can be found here. Please see the links above for further details. The application deadline is 22 January 2018.
Looking forward to presenting my research at the Oxford Water Network seminar series! More details here.
On October 12th, I will be giving a talk at Maynooth university on ‘Disentangling streamflow drivers and forecasting water hazards using Earth Observation’ (details here).
Two papers accepted this month:
Slater, L.J., Villarini, G. (2017) Evaluating the drivers of seasonal streamflow rates in the U.S. Midwest, Water (MDPI). Open Access. PDF.
Villarini, G., Slater, L.J. (2017) Examination of Changes in Annual Maximum Gage Height in the Continental United States Using Quantile Regression, Journal of Hydrologic Engineering (ASCE)
Delighted to have been appointed to the British Society for Geomorphology‘s Executive Committee as Outreach Secretary. 
Blöschl et al.’s published a paper on Changing climate shifts timing of European floods in Science this week (11 August 2017 issue).
Our Perspective on this paper can be downloaded here. It will be open-access the first two weeks, and then accessible via the links on this page.
Our paper has just been accepted in Journal of Climate (American Meteorological Society)!
Zhang, W., Villarini, G., Slater, L., Vecchi, G.A., Bradley, A.A. (2017), Improved ENSO Forecasting using Bayesian Updating and the North American Multi Model Ensemble (NMME), Journal of Climate
Our paper titled ‘Weighting of NMME temperature and precipitation forecasts across Europe‘ has just been accepted in Journal of Hydrology
It is open-access here until Sept 12th!
Slater, L.J., Villarini, G., Bradley, A.A. (2017) Weighting of NMME temperature and precipitation forecasts across Europe, Journal of Hydrology,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2017.07.029
Our paper on dynamical statistical forecasting of seasonal streamflow has just been published in Climate Dynamics!
See the paper here and the associated EGU poster here.
Slater, L.J., Villarini, G., Bradley, A., Vecchi G. (in press) A dynamical statistical framework for seasonal streamflow forecasting in an agricultural watershed, Climate Dynamics. doi:10.1007/s00382-017-3794-7
See here for an updated list of seminars (Hull, Maynooth, New Orleans, Durham..)
Our research group investigates changes in climatic and water-related extremes (especially floods, heat waves, precipitation, drought, and other extremes), fluvial systems (fluvial geomorphology) and water resources. We employ computational, large-sample approaches (data-driven, Earth observation, and ensemble-based methods) to understand how changes in climate, land cover and society affect climatic and water-related extremes over daily to multidecadal timescales.
On these webpages you will find updates on our current research (below), publications, outreach activities, talks/conferences, and some information about the group members and about me. If you are interested in undertaking doctoral or post-doctoral research in any of the above areas, please do check guidance here and get in touch!
Delighted to have joined the team of topical editors for the open-access Journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS; Impact factor 4.4)!
Published in Earth Surface Dynamics:
Clubb et al. Geomorphometric delineation of floodplains and terraces from objectively defined topographic thresholds
