Poster
in
Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning: Global Perspectives and Local Challenges
Bayesian Inference of Severe Hail in Australia
Isabelle Greco · Steven Sherwood · Timothy Raupach · Gab Abramowitz
Keywords: [ Climate science and climate modeling ] [ Disaster management and relief ] [ Extreme weather ] [ Earth observations and monitoring ] [ Uncertainty quantification and robustness ] [ Causal and Bayesian methods ]
Severe hailstorms are responsible for some of the most costly insured weather events in Australia and can cause significant damage to homes, businesses, and agriculture. However their response to climate change remains uncertain, in large part due to the challenges of observing severe hailstorms. We propose a novel Bayesian approach which explicitly models known biases and uncertainties of current hail observations to produce more realistic estimates of severe hail risk. Training this model on data from south-east Queensland, Australia, suggests that previous analyses of severe hail that did not account for this uncertainty may produce poorly calibrated risk estimates. Evaluation on withheld data confirms that our model produces well-calibrated probabilities and is applicable out of sample. Whilst developed for hail, we highlight also the generality of our model and its potential applications to other severe weather phenomena and areas of climate change adaptation and mitigation.