Lecture: Climate-Informed Flood Frequency Analysis and Emerging Perspectives on Flood Hazards

The Research Group Modeling of Environmental Systems (Prof. Dr. Gabriele Chiogna) is delighted to welcome

Abinesh Ganapathy (Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee)

at our institute where he will present a lecture entitled
"Climate-Informed Flood Frequency Analysis and Emerging Perspectives on Flood Hazards".

We look forward to a broad attendance.

When? Tuesday, June 9, 2026 | 12:00–13:00
Room: KH 0.011 Hörsaal Kollegienhaus, EG, Universitätsstraße 15, 91054 Erlangen

Abstract

Flooding is one of the most devastating natural hazards, causing significant loss of life and resources across the globe. Flood Frequency Analysis (FFA) is commonly used to estimate flood quantiles at different return periods, thereby providing essential information to flood managers and decision makers for flood risk assessment. However, the traditional FFA assumes all the flood samples are process-neutral, neglecting the inherent flood-generating mechanisms. Further, with the anthropogenic climate change impact, the flood distributions are expected to change, thereby affecting the flood quantile estimates.
My PhD research addresses these challenges by developing improved approaches for flood quantile estimation. First, I propose a novel methodology that integrates pooling of reforecast datasets and addresses sample heterogeneity to show the importance of incorporating diverse flood-generating processes in FFA. Next, a season-mixing climate-informed approach has been proposed, which exploits climate- flood linkages and incorporates the seasonality effect while estimating flood quantiles. Furthermore, the climate-informed model is extended to forecast season-ahead flood quantiles for the Indian catchments and compares the results against the stationary reference model. The results demonstrate the improved capability of the climate-informed model in forecasting flood quantiles with uncertainty comparable to that of the reference model.
The talk will also highlight other postdoctoral collaborations. These include deterministic modeling of the 2023 Sikkim glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) using a non-Newtonian approach, as well as collaborative research investigating the societal impacts of floods under various counterfactual scenarios. Together, these studies span statistical and deterministic modeling perspectives, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of flood hazards and hydrology in general.