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The EGU (European Geosciences Union) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria, is the largest European geosciences event, bringing together Earth, planetary and space scientists from around the world to share their research and learn from each other.
Every year, a contingent of Fathom climate scientists, hydrologists and software developers head to the EGU to learn about the latest advances in their field, to make new connections and present their own research.
At EGU 2022, Fathom’s Chief Research Officer Dr Oliver Wing gave a talk on UK flood risk in a changing climate. In the same year, we presented FABDEM+, the global DEM with forest and buildings removed.
In 2023, the team’s presentation, Contrasting changes in extreme rainfall and river flow as global mean temperature increases, was picked out by the conveners as a highlight.
Find out what Fathom’s researchers presented at the 2023 EGU
Fathom’s EGU 2024 highlights
At this year’s EGU, seven Fathomers joined more than 18,300 other attendees to present their latest work. Dr Oliver Wing’s talk on A global stochastic flood risk model for any climate scenario, and Dr Natalie Lord’s presentation on Influence of ENSO on extreme precipitation and peak river flow in the US were both chosen by the EGU conveners as highlights of this year’s event.
You can see the full list of abstracts of Fathom’s presentations at EGU General Assembly 2024, as well as a list of research they collaborated on.
Paul Bates receives the John Dalton Medal
This year was also extra special for us because Fathom’s Chairman Prof Paul Bates was awarded the prestigious John Dalton Medal for his distinguished research in hydrology. He received his award in front of a packed house and went on to deliver his prize lecture, entitled How far can we go in global flood inundation modeling.
Watch Professor Paul Bates deliver his 2024 John Dalton medal lecture, How far can we go in global flood inundation modeling
Here’s what Fathomers had to say about EGU24
Hi Conor. How did you find this year’s EGU?
It was really interesting to see the progress that everyone else was making in the field. But it also provided a great opportunity to reflect and feel proud of the work we’ve done over the past couple of years.
How was your poster received?
My poster was received pretty well. It was a niche topic but I had a couple of really good discussions with some of the CAT modelers who’d come to EGU.
What was your favorite talk or poster?
The poster by Katie Facer-Childs from UK-CEH. The research seemed cool, although it wasn’t something I’m particularly familiar with. But half the poster was knitted. It was just a super cool way to present the work!
Jannis, how was the event for you?
This year’s EGU was a great opportunity to exchange insights, meet new and old friends, enjoy the Viennese culture and cuisine, have a look at competitor’s projects, and think of potential research avenues. Altogether, it confirmed that research on global rainfall intensities is timely and relevant, but it also yielded potential improvements – exactly the benefit of being a research-led company.
How was your presentation received?
My presentation was well received and the two hours went very quickly. A recurring motif in the follow-up was that having global information on precipitation extremes is a potentially very useful dataset since observations are scarce in many regions. Many comments centered around the application of the data, not only as input to our class-leading flood models, but also for other purposes such as engineering solutions to extreme rainfall.
What was your favorite talk or poster?
Tricky to mention one specifically. Generally speaking, I find it super-interesting and exciting that more and more research includes the social aspect of hazards and disasters, for instance how they, particularly in light of climate change, affect internal migration and food security.
Hi Natalie, how was this year’s event?
I really enjoyed attending EGU, it’s a brilliant way to get a broad overview of the current state of the science across a wide range of disciplines and research areas. It’s also very useful for learning about the most cutting-edge modeling techniques and datasets that are currently being developed. And to top it all off the city of Vienna is absolutely beautiful!
How was your poster received?
My poster was really well received, and it was selected by the session convenors as a highlight. I had some interesting chats with a range of different researchers, some of whom were doing similar research looking at teleconnections between flooding and climate variability but in regions other than the US, which was our region of focus.
Favorite talk or poster?
I found Erich Fischer’s (ETH Zurich) talk on disaster gaps – multi-century periods with no local extreme precipitation, which are followed by intense temporal clusters of extreme precipitation – very interesting. I also really enjoyed Simona Meiler’s (ETH Zurich) talk on how tropical cyclone hazard models influence future tropical cyclone risks.
Hi Ollie, how was the event for you?
EGU is a great opportunity for our science team to stay abreast of modeling advancements and to share and receive feedback on our ideas and methods. In particular, I enjoyed catching up with friends, old and new, from all over the world and hearing about the work going on in their universities and companies.
How was your presentation received?
I think my oral session went pretty well, although it’s not easy to talk about the methods, testing, and results from a global climate-conditioned catastrophe model for fluvial, pluvial, and coastal flooding in only eight minutes! I had a few great questions, the trickiest of which related to which component holds the most control over model results: hazard or vulnerability.
I answered hazard, as vulnerability uncertainty is known to be large but is pretty easy to represent. Vulnerability is only relevant conditional on hazard exposure: something has to get wet for it to get damaged. But I think my answer was fairly weak, and I’m looking forward to having some quantitative evidence to support it once the model is interrogated more fully.
Favorite talk or poster?
A medal lecture given by Prof. Hayley Fowler from Newcastle University. She spoke with great clarity on how we have observed large increases in sub-daily rainfall extremes due to climate change, far more than we would expect from thermodynamics alone (7% per degree warming). She stressed how these changes are not fully captured by global climate models, and that multiple tools including observations and more localized convection-permitting models are needed to appraise climate impacts. Her work hammers home how important it is to not interpret models of climate risk beyond their intrinsic skill.
Hi Seb, how was the event for you?
It is always fun to go back to beautiful Vienna, catch up with old friends, and have a good time with colleagues. But what I was happiest about this year were the new connections with top researchers and exciting leads for future collaborations.
How was your presentation received?
I am overjoyed with the amount of interest, the generous and insightful suggestions, and overall positive reaction to our work. This year I had the chance to talk about correcting the bias of large climate model ensembles; Natalie Lord showed how ENSO phases are correlated with hydrological extremes and the damages derived from them; and Alex Saoulis presented his superb work using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to downscale climate data.
Favorite talk or poster?
Among many insightful presentations, I particularly enjoyed Paul C. Astagneau’s work showing how we cannot have it all when it comes to bias correction; some approaches are better for high-flows, and others are better for droughts. Another highlight for me was Professor Hailey Fowler’s Soloviev Medal lecture, which took us through her impressive work so far and outlined her vision on storylines as key to improve adaptation to future extreme events.
Niall, how was this year’s event?
The event, as usual, was well organized and offered participants access to a huge variety of interesting science displays, presentations and networking opportunities. Personally, the main benefit was making new connections for potential collaborations and even future hires. Fathom seems to be very popular and people are keen to actively make contact on both counts these days.
How was your presentation received?
My poster (and all Fathom posters) seemed to be well received. There was a lot of interest in general, and many comments on the ambitious scope of the work. I think people will be very impressed if we are able to pull it off! The poster was great for making new connections, as it gives a focal point to chat around and think about common interests. Perhaps the most common question was on the clustering work that Reask has been doing on the tropical cyclones (TCs). I think the hydraulic frameworks are interesting but the novel addition the poster made really was how we hope to represent the huge parameter space, and this starts with the selection (clustering) of the TC events themselves.
Favorite talk or poster?
My favorite non-Fathom presentation was by Tim Leijnse. He is the lead behind the SFINCs model, which we are using in our framework for nearshore and inundation modeling. It was great to meet him in person and see his more recent work on “snapwave”, which looks like a promising module that will enable rapid (and computationally inexpensive) estimation of nearshore wave conditions. This is important as wave estimations are a huge computational burden, and currently we have to make significant simplifications to represent their influence on coastal flooding.
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