Date: 12 November 2025
Lecture Topic: Exploiting Global Variability to Anticipate Hydrologic Extremes

Speaker: Thorsten Wagener
Affiliation: University of Potsdam, Germany

Speaker Profile: Professor Thorsten Wagener is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for the Analysis of Hydrologic Systems at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and an internationally renowned expert in hydrologic system analysis. His research covers hydrologic systems from watershed to global scales, integrating data-driven and process-based models. He has made pioneering contributions to fields such as watershed classification, Predictions in Ungauged Basins (PUB), and diagnostic evaluation of Earth system models. The uncertainty quantification and attribution methods he developed have been widely applied in mathematical modeling research.
Professor Wagener has previously taught at the University of Bristol (UK) and Pennsylvania State University (USA). He holds a PhD from Imperial College London, and is a graduate of Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the University of Siegen (Germany). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and has received numerous international honors, including The Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, The American Society of Civil Engineers Walter L. Huber Engineering Research Prize, and The Chinese Academy of Sciences International Outstanding Scientist Cooperation Award.

Lecture Overview: Floods are among the most common and devastating natural hazards globally, yet our ability to predict the location, magnitude, and potential losses of extreme flood events remains limited. This lecture conducts stress tests on global human-environment systems to analyze the inundation sensitivity of floodplains and population exposure risks under different flood event intensities. The research first reveals that current large-scale hydrologic models still struggle to accurately simulate flood peak processes. Furthermore, based on 1.2 million river reaches worldwide, it explores the impacts of factors such as topography, catchment area, and social behavior on flood sensitivity.
The results show that residents in areas sensitive to frequent floods are relatively evenly distributed, reflecting a certain level of risk adaptation capacity. In contrast, in areas only sensitive to extreme floods, populations are often concentrated in regions that are rarely inundated under normal circumstances but pose potential high risks—these areas will face greater threats as climate change intensifies flood extremeness. The research emphasizes that even under current data conditions, information highly insightful for future disaster prevention and mitigation decision-making can still be uncovered.

Lecture Time:
Beijing Time: 21:00 on 12 November
UK Time: 13:00 on 12 November

Lecture Link: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/abce/unesco-chair/events/webinar-series/2025/12-november-thorsten-wagener/

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