Prof. Juergen Kurths speaks on extreme climate events and complex systems

Prof. Juergen Kurths, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Humboldt University Berlin and Senior Advisor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, delivered a distinguished lecture titled “Climate Meets Complex Systems: Exploring Extreme Climate Events via a Complex Network Approach” on 23 November 2022.

The Earth system is very complex and dynamic based on various feedbacks. This makes predictions and risk analysis in extreme climates a challenging task. The understanding of basic physical mechanisms and exploring anthropogenic influences on climate has been a fundamental open problem since the introduction of physical models for weather forecasts in 1922.

In this lecture, Prof. Kurths discussed the occurrence of extreme events and consequences of sea-level rise and introduced a recently developed approach via complex networks mainly to analyze strong climate events. He further proposed the method to reconstruct and analyze a complex network from spatio-temporal data, which uncovers relations to global and regional circulation patterns in oceans and the atmosphere.

About the speaker

Prof. Juergen Kurths is a Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Humboldt University Berlin and a Senior Advisor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He is internationally recognized for his research on complex synchronization phenomena, complex networks, time series analysis and their applications in climatology, sustainability research, physiology, and engineering. Focusing on inferring complex networks from spatio-temporal data in climatology, he obtained a successful prediction of the onset of the Indian Summer Monsoon, El Nino, or the Indian Ocean Dipole with a strongly extended prediction horizon.

Prof. Kurths was awarded the Lewis Fry Richardson medal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU), the Alexander von Humboldt research award, and the Lagrange prize. He is also a fellow of the Academia Europaea, the American Physical Society, the Network Science Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and got several Honorary Doctorates and Honorary Professors.

About the Institute of Creativity

Supported by Hung Hin Shiu Charitable Foundation, the Institute of Creativity is established to strengthen the research culture, nurture a critical mass of research talent, sharpen the research performance, and further promote the development of interdisciplinary research and theme-based research on campus.  The Institute is led by renowned scholars in different academic disciplines, outstanding business leaders, and successful entrepreneurs from industries. 

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