Master's Degree Research
East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina
January 2020 - Present
The combination of multiple climatic drivers across spatial and temporal scales is
referred to as a compound event. Flood events result from the
coincidence of drivers
that are typically climatic in nature. Three distinct flood drivers:
pluvial
(precipitation-based), fluvial (river-based), and coastal (tidal-based) have the
potential for causing damages on their own, but if these drivers occur concurrently or
in close succession, this is called a Compound Coastal Water Event
(CCWE) and the
adverse consequences of the hazards can be exacerbated leading to substantial impacts.
My research will introduce a copula-based approach that can be used to obtain
multivariate probabilistic assessments of CCWE drivers and their corresponding return
periods. It has been hypothesized that the joint distributions will yield a greater
hazard risk and smaller return period for each variable compared to their univariate
distributions. Analyzing all drivers will provide a better understanding of CCWE and how
to respond to these events.
