EXPRIMA

A description of the different groups and their activities can be found at the respective websites:

• KU Leuven’s Hydraulics and Geotechnics Section
• RMIB's Observations and Meteorological and Climatological Research Scientific Services

Below is a summary of the research activities relevant for this position.

The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMIB) is a federal scientific institute that provides meteorological services. It is the national data, research and knowledge center for weather, climate and geophysics. RMIB operates in a context of international cooperation. The scientific research of the RMIB is aimed at supporting, innovating and ensuring the continuity of its public missions. These include the provision of general weather forecasts and warnings of dangerous weather conditions, climate monitoring, the collection, verification and archiving of meteorological and geophysical data, the management of the necessary infrastructure and model development. Regarding seamless prediction, there is a strong collaboration with national meteorological services with similar activities, such as MeteoSwiss, FMI Finland, KNMI and ZAMG Austria. There are also links with the projects SARWS (novel and opportunistic data sources), CSMASK (crowdsourced data for high-resolution atmospheric modelling), and the FED-tWIN projects AIM (Artificial Intelligence in Meteorological Applications), and DEEP (Deep learning combined with physical modelling for weather, climate and geophysics applications). RMIB also has strong climate research expertise, cooperates actively with the federal crisis center, the regional hydrological services (VMM, HIC, BIM/IBGE, SBGE, SPW/DGO2, SPW/DG03) and the regional road management services.

Two scientific services are involved: Meteorological and Climatological Research and Observations.

KU Leuven’s Hydraulics and Geotechnics Section has international core expertise in statistical analysis and stochastic modelling of rainfall and hydrological extremes, extreme value analysis, statistical downscaling, impact of rainfall and climate variability and change on hydrological extremes. The Section moreover focuses on impact analysis on river and urban floods, droughts/low flows/water availability, along coast and estuaries by means of hydrological and hydraulic impact models, risk analysis, real-time forecasting and control, and uncertainty analysis. The group has strong collaborations/connections with regional hydrological services, water management authorities and stakeholders. At the international level, members of the group are actively involved in the European Water Association, the International Water Association (IWA) & International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR), the WMO (World Meteorological Organization) - Commission for Hydrology (CHy), the EUMETSAT H-SAF Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management, etc. They moreover contribute to several EU projects. KU Leuven is partner in the H2020 project “PRECINT – Preparedness and resilience enforcement for critical infrastructure cascading cyberphysical threats and effects with focus on district or regional protection”, was work package leader on “extreme weather disasters” in the recently completed H2020 project BRIGAID on climate adaptation, was a core partner in the recently finished H2020 project Climate-fit.city on extreme rainfall services in the context of climate change, was work package leader in the EU Interreg project RainGain on radar based extreme rainfall and urban flood nowcasting, was chairing for several years the International Working Group on Urban Rainfall (IGUR), etc. In the project PLURISK for the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo), KU Leuven cooperated with RMIB on urban rainfall and pluvial flood risk nowcasting.