Peter Miersch

I am a doctoral researcher aiming to utilize causal inference methods to identify key flood drivers across river basins. While rainfall is a known predictor of flood occurrence, the complex flood generating mechanism is dominated by compounding events. Precipitation excess, snowmelt, rain-on-snow-events, and preconditioned soil-moisture are all potentially causally related to flooding at different time-scales. Enabled by recent developments in causal inference, I aim to help develop of a coherent data driven methodology to close this research gap and apply it to process-based high-resolution models and real-world observational data.

I am part of the compound weather and climate events group, led by Dr. Jakob Zscheischler and work together with Dr. Jakob Runge at the German Aerospace Center within the CausalFlood project.

Research interests

• causal inference
• compound weather and climate events
• flood forecasting and impact
• interpretable machine learning for scientific advances