Peter Miersch

I am a postdoctoral researcher studying how weather and climate extremes and their impacts are changing in a warming climate, with a focus on floods, droughts and compound events and their climatic drivers. As part of the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin of the Destination Earth initiative, I run global hydrological simulations with the mesoscale Hydrologic Model (mHM), driven by high-resolution climate projections, and quantify the sources of uncertainty along this modelling chain. Building on this, I study how human-caused climate change has affected European floods: by examining extremes under past, present and future climate conditions, I aim to quantify how climate change has altered hazards such as floods and what to expect in the future. To do so, I combine climate model simulations with process-based and machine-learning hydrological models within a storyline framework.

I obtained my PhD from TU Dresden with a thesis on “Understanding drivers of European floods in a changing climate using storyline attribution and causal discovery”, supervised by Jakob Zscheischler. During my PhD, I worked in the UFZ Department of Compound Environmental Risks.

ORCID: 0000-0002-5009-0978

• Floods, droughts, and other compound climate extremes
• Attribution of extreme events to climate change
• Storyline attribution methods
• Causal inference and machine learning in large sample hydrology
• Projections of climate risk and quantifying their uncertainties